Machine identities are digital entities used to identify, authenticate and authorize machines, devices and IT infrastructure as well as the applications, cloud workloads and automated processes within an IT infrastructure. Machine identities represent a broad category that includes any digital identity not associated with or operated by a human. They can be automatically created and terminated on demand to dynamically scale to meet the needs of the business.
What is the difference between machine identities vs. Non-human identities
A non-human identity can refer to identities used by services or applications to interact with other cloud resources and can exclude the identities associated with physical devices, such as IoT devices. In contrast, a machine identity can be used to authenticate and manage devices rather than services and involves securing and managing certificates, keys and other credentials that identify and control access for machines, such as servers, laptops or IoT devices. With virtualization and cloud-based services these distinctions are blurring and are less widely used.
Why is it Important to Protect Machine Identities?
Machine identities are established using digital certificates and cryptographic keys for machine-to-machine identity and access management, much like people employ usernames and passwords. Without the proper management and security of machine identities, organizations can’t guarantee the confidentiality of information that flows to authorized machines and prevent the flow of information to unauthorized machines.
Compromised machine identities can have a significant security impact on organizations. Attackers can misuse machine identities to establish hidden or concealed encrypted communication tunnels on enterprise networks and gain privileged access to data and resources. Forged or stolen machine identities can also allow an attacker’s machine to masquerade as a legitimate machine and be trusted with sensitive data.
To keep up with the volume, velocity and variety of machine identity changes, organizations need to intelligently orchestrate the management of a complex, rapidly changing set of machine identity data. Driven by a set of policies and controls that orchestrate machine identities, machine identity management can improve an organization’s cybersecurity, reduce risk and support regulatory, legal and operational requirements.
According to Gartner, one minute of IT downtime costs, on average, $5,600. That’s $336,000 per hour! What’s more, this doesn’t even consider the potential longer-term impact that degraded service can attract. Issues such as customer churn and decreased win rates will rear their ugly head if issues persist. And with 73% of organizations falling victim to certificate-related outages – it certainly seems to be a matter of when, not if.
Learn more about machine identities
- Why Machine Identity is as Important as User Identity to Infrastructure Security – CyberArk Developer
- Why Machine identities Are Essential Strands in Your Zero Trust Strategy (cyberark.com)
- Understanding APIs and How Attackers Abuse Them to Steal Data (cyberark.com)
- Essentials to Securing Kubernetes Secrets with Secrets Management – CyberArk Developer
