Over half of data breaches are down to digital certificates

Among organizations that have suffered data breaches, 58 percent were caused by avoidable issues related to digital certificates.

New research conducted by Forrester for AppViewX also shows that as a result of service outages 57 percent say their organizations have incurred costs upwards of $100,000 per outage.

The study of over 300 senior IT decision makers at organizations with over $500 million annual turnover finds 52 percent of those that suffered a service or application outage attributed the cause to certificated related issues. It's unsurprising then that 53 percent of respondents say they want to operationalize and fully automate their organization's machine identity management (MIM) initiatives within the next one to two years

In addition 53 percent highlighted the need to balance management of human and machine identities and vulnerabilities in an increasingly complex IT, edge and hybrid-cloud environment as a top driver of their organizations' approach to MIM

According to respondents, the top two drivers for implementing MIM are the desire to reduce the risk of data breaches (51 percent) and gain visibility over certificates and keys across emerging technologies (48 percent)

"We believe these findings demonstrate the risks and costs associated with lack of visibility and control over machine identity management, which can result in reputationally and financially damaging data breaches and service outages," says Murali Palanisamy, chief solutions officer at AppViewX. "With machine-based identities multiplying exponentially, organizations need to implement an integrated approach to machine and human identity management as a foundation for identity-first security and path to Zero Trust."

The full report is available from the AppViewX site.

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