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Outages Related to Machine Identity on the Rise

Because CIOs often have limited visibility into the number of machine identities on their networks and these critical security assets are not prioritized in IAM and security budgets, CIOs should expect to see a sharp increase in machine identity related outages and security breaches, according to a new study of 1,000 CIOs conducted by Venafi.


Machine identities enable secure connection and authentication for every part of IT infrastructure, from physical, virtual servers and IoT devices to software applications, APIs and containers. Any time two machines need to authenticate each other a machine identity is required.

100% of CIOs say that digital transformation is driving a dramatic increase in the number of machine identities their organizations require. Without an automated machine identity management program, organizations suffer from outages caused by expired machine identities and breaches caused by machine identity misuse or compromise.

According to the study, the average organization used nearly a quarter of a million (250,000) machine identities at the end of 2021. This is a startling number when you consider that organizations initially underestimate machine identity populations by 50% or more because they have extremely limited visibility into the machine identities their organization requires.

At current rates of growth, these same organizations can expect their machine identity inventory to more than double to at least 500,000 by 2024.

Moreover, three-quarters of surveyed CIOs said that they expect digital transformation initiatives to increase the number of machine identities in their organizations by 26% — with more than one-quarter (27%) citing a percentage of higher than 50%.

Key survey findings include:

■ 83% of organizations suffered a machine identity related outage during the last 12 months; over a quarter (26%) say critical systems were impacted.

■ 57% of organizations experienced at least one data breach or security incident related to compromised machine identities (including TLS, SSH keys and code signing keys and certificates) during the same time period.

"The realities of digital transformation mean that every business is now a software company. This means IAM priorities need to shift to protect the machine identities required for digital transformation initiatives because these initiatives are the engines of innovation and growth," said Kevin Bocek, VP of Security Strategy and Threat Intelligence at Venafi. "The unfortunate reality is that most organizations are not prepared to manage all the machines identities they need. This rapidly growing gap has opened a new attack surface – from software build pipelines to Kubernetes clusters – that is very attractive to attackers."

The rise in the number of machines on enterprise networks is exposing outdated machine identity management practices. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of CIOs say that rather than using a comprehensive machine identity management solution, their organizations combine multiple solutions and processes, including point solutions from certificate authorities (CAs) and public cloud providers, homegrown solutions and manual processes. This approach does not provide enterprise-wide view of all machine identities or provide the mechanisms needed to enforce configuration or policy requirements.

"Machine identity management is in the early stages of adoption. It's very similar to what happened with customer and workforce identity a few years ago, but it's orders of magnitude larger in scale and change is happening much faster," Bocek continued. "The challenges connected with human identity management pale in contrast to the challenges of managing machine identities. This research underscores the urgent need for every organization to evaluate their machine identity management program in order to protect their digital transformation initiatives."

Methodology: Conducted by Coleman Parkes Research, Venafi's survey evaluated the opinions of 1000 CIOs across six countries/regions: United States, United Kingdom, France, DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) and Australasia (Australia, New Zealand).

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Outages Related to Machine Identity on the Rise

Because CIOs often have limited visibility into the number of machine identities on their networks and these critical security assets are not prioritized in IAM and security budgets, CIOs should expect to see a sharp increase in machine identity related outages and security breaches, according to a new study of 1,000 CIOs conducted by Venafi.


Machine identities enable secure connection and authentication for every part of IT infrastructure, from physical, virtual servers and IoT devices to software applications, APIs and containers. Any time two machines need to authenticate each other a machine identity is required.

100% of CIOs say that digital transformation is driving a dramatic increase in the number of machine identities their organizations require. Without an automated machine identity management program, organizations suffer from outages caused by expired machine identities and breaches caused by machine identity misuse or compromise.

According to the study, the average organization used nearly a quarter of a million (250,000) machine identities at the end of 2021. This is a startling number when you consider that organizations initially underestimate machine identity populations by 50% or more because they have extremely limited visibility into the machine identities their organization requires.

At current rates of growth, these same organizations can expect their machine identity inventory to more than double to at least 500,000 by 2024.

Moreover, three-quarters of surveyed CIOs said that they expect digital transformation initiatives to increase the number of machine identities in their organizations by 26% — with more than one-quarter (27%) citing a percentage of higher than 50%.

Key survey findings include:

■ 83% of organizations suffered a machine identity related outage during the last 12 months; over a quarter (26%) say critical systems were impacted.

■ 57% of organizations experienced at least one data breach or security incident related to compromised machine identities (including TLS, SSH keys and code signing keys and certificates) during the same time period.

"The realities of digital transformation mean that every business is now a software company. This means IAM priorities need to shift to protect the machine identities required for digital transformation initiatives because these initiatives are the engines of innovation and growth," said Kevin Bocek, VP of Security Strategy and Threat Intelligence at Venafi. "The unfortunate reality is that most organizations are not prepared to manage all the machines identities they need. This rapidly growing gap has opened a new attack surface – from software build pipelines to Kubernetes clusters – that is very attractive to attackers."

The rise in the number of machines on enterprise networks is exposing outdated machine identity management practices. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of CIOs say that rather than using a comprehensive machine identity management solution, their organizations combine multiple solutions and processes, including point solutions from certificate authorities (CAs) and public cloud providers, homegrown solutions and manual processes. This approach does not provide enterprise-wide view of all machine identities or provide the mechanisms needed to enforce configuration or policy requirements.

"Machine identity management is in the early stages of adoption. It's very similar to what happened with customer and workforce identity a few years ago, but it's orders of magnitude larger in scale and change is happening much faster," Bocek continued. "The challenges connected with human identity management pale in contrast to the challenges of managing machine identities. This research underscores the urgent need for every organization to evaluate their machine identity management program in order to protect their digital transformation initiatives."

Methodology: Conducted by Coleman Parkes Research, Venafi's survey evaluated the opinions of 1000 CIOs across six countries/regions: United States, United Kingdom, France, DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) and Australasia (Australia, New Zealand).

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The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...