The number of machine identities we use is growing astronomically. Some statistics state that we’re dealing with 45x more machine identities than human identities. Also that large organizations are, on average, managing about 250,000 machine identities across their organization. Personally, I think that’s low. I’d hazard a guess that it’s about 10x more.
And now Google is enacting a change to the issues of their certificates that's going to require a rotation every 90 days. If you're doing that manually, you're going to have a problem. You're going to have a very difficult time staying on top of it. That industry change is coming.
When you look at this scale, it’s no wonder that a lot of organizations say that they're struggling with the management and security of certificates. Surprisingly, a lot of that management is still being done manually. And that approach simply won’t scale. Automation seems like a no brainer. But a lot of organizations are still not automating the issuance of certificates. In other words, they're not automating the life cycle management behind it. They're not taking the time to understand that there are multiple teams that are managing issuing certificates.
That's creating a challenge within organizations because the use of these certificates to establish trust with machines is not being leveraged correctly. And that's causing problems not only from an operational perspective, but also from a security perspective. How are we able to stay it on top of identifying and establishing what's that zone of trust?
Increasing risk of certificate outages
The implications of having something not managed or secured correctly can potentially impact your organization in a massive way, not only from a regulatory and security perspective, but from an operational perspective. If any of these machine identities goes down because its certificate has expired, your business stops running.
The best time to know you're going to have an outage is before it happens, because the worst time you want to have it happen is after it does happen. Because once it's down, it takes a longer time to figure out what's going on. You're impacting the business every time, every second that goes by.
Loss of service is loss of revenue. Loss of revenue damages your reputation and causes a problem. Plus, threat actors are looking for any advantage they can take to get inside your organization. If you're not managing your certificates correctly, cybercriminals can get in, and they will take advantage of it. And the risk of data theft goes through the roof.
CIO Study: Automation Vital to Address Shorter Lifespans and Massive Growth of TLS/SSL Certificates
Certificate lifecycle automation is key
As we continue rapid modernization efforts, our environments become more complex. We're spinning up cloud instances in five minutes. We’re putting servers online and standing up applications and workloads on the fly. If security is not integrated into the process and how machine get stood up, that quickly becomes a problem. Doing this manually is a nightmare. You're simply not going to be successful. Automating certificate management is foundational on how we're going to get ahead in certificate management.
And by automating policies and procedures, you can enable teams to get things done faster. But to do that, you need a streamlined approach to automation that doesn’t require a lot of custom coding and a pretty turnkey will allow our teams to get things done a lot more quickly. Also, by leveraging automation to deliver proactive reporting, proactive inventory, and a proactive view on when you need to rotate certificates, you're going to be able to better manage the security and reliability of your machine identities.
Leveraging an automated solution, in conjunction with the policies and procedures, will be a key step in helping your organization innovate, maintain its operational capabilities, and meet your business objectives.
To do that, you need to understand how you can get certificates out there quickly and understand how fast you can inventory it. The inventorying is going to be the big part. You want to find out where all your certificates are located, especially those that are being managed with a certificate store that's not under your direct control. It’s really the only way you can minimize the likelihood of an outage or a security incident and leveraging automation is going to help you do this.
Conclusion
Leveraging automation solutions like certificate lifecycle management and all the capabilities that it brings are critical to streamline your certificate workflow. With automated processes, you’ll have what it takes to integrate to provide your business units with the visibility and the control and the confidence they need to develop a next generation of products and solutions and services, while at the same time minimizing their risks for potential breaches, security incidents.