This week hundreds of the leading organizations on the planet gathered at Machine Identity Management Global Summit to share perspectives and learn new strategies for preparing for the future. Over three days, attendees basked in actionable advice from over 75 presentations, including 6 mind-blowing keynotes, lightning talks and fireside chats with over 15 industry-leading executives, and access to the latest advancements from 40 Venafi partners and developers. Positive reactions from attendees included, “Such a great event with so much invaluable info!” and "This has been the best conference I've attended in a long time." One attendee even went so far as to call Global Summit a “master class in machine identity management.”
Why was this the moment for machine identity management? With digital transformation forging full on ahead and DevOps becoming the main vehicle for business acceleration, machine identity management professionals will soon be up against a wall of new machine identities. They need machine identity management strategies that will help them prepare for that onslaught. I’d like to share with you concerns and insights that were top of mind among this year’s Global Summit attendees.
Zero trust
“We need to adjust the idea that ‘no one wants to encrypt their data unless they have to.’ The ‘have to’ is a way of life, not an option. We’re way past the era when people didn’t want to lock their front door. We might want a different world, but we must live in and operate in the world we have.”
“There is a lifecycle of trust that needs to be developed with business owners. As I am explaining, we found ‘tribal knowledge’ was insufficient for certificate management. With automation, we were able to do the certificate renewal process efficiently and effectively. Business owners were much happier with automation.”
“Trust management has had me concerned more and more recently. All these systems with default trust stores all over the place - trusting foreign entity CAs, etc. Trying to solve for that has been very tough.”
CIO Study: Automation Vital to Address Shorter Lifespans and Massive Growth of TLS/SSL Certificates
Outages
“Our PKI team is often blamed for outages when we have no control over the applications and servers involved in the outage.”
“The costs associated with applications outages due to certificate management issues can really add up as well. To account for some costs - it is important to note how much revenue is lost, if an application is not available.”
“The clean-up effort was so worth it. We reduced our outages due to certificates 99%.”
Automation
“I look at automation from a macro level and a doomsday scenario. What happens when there is a CA compromise and tens of thousands of certs need to be reissued within a few days. This could bring a company to its knees. Automation would streamline the replacement process for this situation. Plan for doomsday with automation and the byproduct of this covers all other concerns with cert management.”
“Automation has resulted in other team members and partners having more time for other opportunities that they did not have time for previously themselves.”
Our execs know and understand that digital disruption (in general) is already here, and that we need automation to keep going. I’m grateful to Venafi for the information and tools to help start the conversation with them specifically within the machine identify space.
Cloud native
“Cloud native environments are often highly dynamic. and much less fixed in nature. This means high levels of automation are an absolute must.”
“If security is planned into the development plan, then it shouldn't be a roadblock, but a benefit for stability of the product, job stability for everyone by not ending up in the news in a bad way, performance benefit by defending against bots, and tons of other things. Look at security as the team that backs you up for doing the right thing instead of a roadblock against immature coding.”
“With things like CI/CD pipelines, cloud deployments, and requirements for machine identities everywhere: a fastsecure mindset is the only way we will be able to keep up with the pace of modern technology.”
Quantum
“Crypto agility is absolutely key to this crypto migration which will be the largest we have faced. We also need to discover all of the crypto in our systems. This is required to help drive the vendors to adopting the upcoming new crypto algorithms in a timely fashion.”
“Improve your crypto agility and no matter what direction the industry takes...your organization is prepared!”
“Predicting and preparation go hand in hand together, you predict different scenarios and prepare against them and hope that they are flexible enough for the reality that comes along.”
Final thoughts
Do you share some of the insights and challenges that Venafi customers shared this week at Machine Identity Management Global Summit? Contact us to see how Venafi can help you manage your organization’s machine identities using a rare combination of visibility, intelligence and automation.
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