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A new global study from Venafi says data transformation is motivating annual 42% growth in managing machine identities. CIOs normally have restricted visibility into the identifying machines on their network. These crucial security elements aren’t considered in security budgets.

Meanwhile, CIOs must consider experiencing a rapid enhancement in machine identity linked to failure and security threats. Machine identities offer safe connections and approval for every field of IT infrastructure. It includes physical & virtual servers, software applications, APIs, Containers, and IoT devices.

Why a Machine Identity is Essential?

A machine identity is essential any time when 2 machines want to authorize each other. Most CIOs said digital transformation is motivating a striking increase in organizations requiring machine identities. Organizations could suffer from expired machine identities with blackouts and compromising or misusing machine identities towards flaws.

The study of Venafi says the average organization would consume around 250K for machine identities at the end of 2021. Machine identity management experts at Venafi have considered it significantly a bigger number. Most organizations initially didn’t consider machine identity expansion at 50%. It was due to their restricted visibility into their required machine identities.

Expected Machine Identity Inventory

These organizations are considering growth rates and expecting their machine identity inventory to reach around 500 thousand by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, at least 70% of surveyed CIOs said they are expecting digital transformation initiatives. It would efficiently increase the number of machine identities by 26% in their organizations. More than 25% are also predicting a percentage of up to 50%.

The major survey results showed around 82% of organizations have suffered machine identity-linked blackouts in the last year. More than 27% said crucial systems were affected. Around 56% of organizations face at least one data security or breaching incident linked to settled machine identities. It includes SSH, TLS keys, certificates, and code signing keys.

Identities are Essential for Digital Transformation

The vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence for Venafi, Kevin Bocek issued a statement. He said the actual definition of digital transformation indicates that every business has now become a software company. It clearly indicates that IAM priorities want to move to protect the machine identities.

These identities are essential for digital transformation motivations and are considered engines for growth and inventions. Bocek said it is really unfortunate that various organizations aren’t yet ready to handle their required machine identities. This speedily increasing distance has provided a new surface to attack from software-constructed pipelines, very attractive to hackers.

The Acceptance for Machine Identity Management

However, increasing enterprise networks with a number of machines are disclosing outdated machine identity management exercises. Around 65% of CIOs said their organizations maintain multiple solutions, instead of using a beneficial machine identity management system. It includes direct solutions from CAs (certificate authorities), homegrown solutions, manual processes, and public cloud providers.

This strategy doesn’t offer enterprise-level focus to entire machine identities. It can’t provide essential mechanisms to enforce policy or configuration needs. However, machine identity management is now in its early stages of acceptance. The issues linked with human identity management are bloodless in contrast to the machine identities management challenges. The recent survey emphasizes the essential requirement for every organization to assess their machine identity management program.