Machines And Workloads Need Identities Too - Not Just Humans
Cloud Native Now, Tuesday, July 16th, 2024
When we think of digital identity, it is usually in terms of human beings - personal logins, usernames, passwords, and the like that enable us to access apps and services. However, a major part of digital identity is being ignored within organizations - machine identities.
A machine can be anything from an IoT device to servers. We also need to consider the workloads that run on those devices, such as containers, microservices or even a bash script, and how they too need identities. So, why should we be concerned about the security of machines and workload identities?
Just as human identities can be hacked and used to steal critical information, so can machine and workload identities. If these identities are not being managed consistently across environments, they can pose an increased risk of compromise to your organization.
In addition, the number of machines and workload identities are only going to increase as multi-cloud becomes the norm and more people adopt cloud-native architectures. In 2023, workload identities outnumbered human identities 10 to 1, and that gap is set to widen substantially in the coming years. I anticipate it could even become 100 to 1 very soon.
Let's dive into some advice for managing machine and workload identities.