Why Machine Identity Management is Core to Cybersecurity
With 98% of organizations facing the need to improve their machine identity management approach, today’s organizations need a strategic machine identity management program that adheres to the best practices of each digital identity. Here are a few initiatives that IT teams can undertake to better manage their IT infrastructure.
Break IT Infrastructure Silos With an Inventory Check
Before organizations tackle a machine identity management program, it’s essential to first have visibility into the entire IT ecosystem. The most common forms of digital identities are keys, public and private keys, symmetric keys and certificates—and organizations must understand details about each identity including its expiration date, authority and where it’s located.
Creating inventory lists of the various keys and certificates can help IT teams understand the trust level of each machine. It’s recommended that certificates be grouped based on the expiration date, how critical each one is and its type (e.g. SSL/TLS certificates, SSH keys, cryptographic or symmetric keys, etc.).
Create a Centralized Locations for Keys and Certificates
One of the unique challenges with machine identity management is that each certificate and key is used by various teams within the organization in a different way. There’s little insight into how each certificate is used, by whom it’s used and when they’ve expired, for example.
To better govern the various keys and certificates, IT should create one centralized location for all of them. By keeping a centralized inventory of all digital keys and certificates, the IT team will have insight into the various device identities outside their organization’s network, including the cloud, as well as knowledge into what IoT devices are being used and by which employee; this is crucial to understand given today’s remote and hybrid work environments. IT teams will also be able to regularly conduct security token audits to help easily identify any vulnerabilities more quickly.
Consider Automation
In Gartner’s Top Security Trends and Risks for 2021 report, the firm reported that “Identity-first security puts identity at the center of security design and demands a major shift from traditional LAN edge design thinking,” but IT teams are consistently struggling to manage and protect credentials. Machine identity management has historically been a manual process that’s been done using spreadsheets or even physical paper lists. However, these antiquated methods are time-consuming, error-prone and ultimately ineffective.
By automating certificate and key life cycle management, machine identities are kept up-to-date and outages are effectively eliminated. Nearly half of today’s organizations found they had stronger security posture after automating machine identity management workflows, according to The Next-Gen Machine Identity Management Report. And most automation partners can also help enable cryptographic agility, providing algorithm upgrades to offer the best possible protection under all circumstances.
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