Effective enterprise security requires implementing a multilayered strategy; authentication and authorization are two critical elements of this approach. Any time anyone within the organization accesses the network, an application, or a service, they must provide the proper credentials to show that they have authorization to do so, such as a username, password, token, or similar.
However, identity management is also integral to securing machines and workloads. Machines (the physical hardware like servers and any connected devices), as well as the workloads that run on them, also have identities. Just like your identity is vulnerable to hacking, so are machine identities, which puts your company at risk of a massive data breach or other security compromise.
Why Machine Identity Management Matters
Few technologies have seen the rapid growth and adoption of the cloud over the last decade, and multi-cloud environments and cloud-native architectures are now the norm. This cloud infrastructure adoption has led to exponentially growing identities for machines and workloads in addition to users. According to some accounts, machine and workload identities will soon outnumber human identities 100 to 1.
This means hackers have significant opportunities to enter your organization and steal information. Unless you take the same approach to identity management for machines and workloads as you do for humans, your company is at risk.
The Basics of Machine and Workload Identity Management
Addressing the issue of workload identity requires more than simply creating identities. Businesses should implement a multilayered approach to addressing risk. Doing so creates an environment similar to that used to manage human identities; in short, everything inside your business network must prove it has permission to do so.
The foundation of workload identity management is assigning identities to every machine and workload and managing them throughout their lifecycle. The second layer determines and controls what each identity can access, limiting it to only the most necessary actions and resources. Finally, the top layer manages and implements the rules and standards.
Open-source standards are the key to this approach to effectively managing identity governance and lifecycle management. Consistent and widely adopted standards ensure that tools and systems from different vendors are compatible, making verifying workload and machine identities easier.
Machine Identity Management: The New Frontier of Security
Before the widespread adoption of the cloud, IT security focused primarily on protecting the perimeter to address threats to on-premises machines. However, with widely dispersed workloads running everywhere, the concept of the perimeter no longer applies. It’s also no longer enough to secure only human identities, as machines and workloads interact in disparate environments without human interaction.
Modern enterprise security requires businesses to implement security protocols that verify and manage the authorization of machine and workload identities to protect the network across cloud environments. Doing so ensures a more secure and resilient IT infrastructure that can be counted on for the long haul.
