Venafi has announced results of a study of the scale and frequency of certificate-related outages on critical business infrastructure, https://www.venafi.com/blog/majority-businesses-still-experience-outages-are-you-protecting-your-certificates
Over 550 chief information officers (CIOs) from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia participated.
While humans rely on usernames and passwords to identify themselves and gain authorized access to applications and services, machines use digital certificates to serve as machine identities in order to communicate securely with other machines and gain authorized access to applications and services. Certificate-related outages harm the reliability and availability of vital network systems and services while also being extremely difficult to diagnose and remediate. Unfortunately, the vast majority of businesses routinely suffer from these events.
According to the study:
- More than half, almost two-thirds of organizations (60%) experienced certificate-related outages that impacted critical business applications or services within the last year.
- 74% faced similar events within the last 24 months.
- 85% believe the increasing complexity and interdependence of IT systems will make outages even more painful in the future.
- Nearly 80% estimate certificate use in their organizations will grow by 25 percent or more in the next five years, with over half anticipating minimum growth rates of more than 50 percent.
- While 50% of CIOs are concerned that certificate outages will have an impact on customer experience, 45% are more concerned about the time and resources they consume.
“Recently, a machine identity-related outage impacted 32 million cellular customers in the U.K., and estimates suggest this could have cost the company over $100 million,” said Kevin Bocek, vice president, security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi. “Ultimately, companies must get control of all of their certificates; otherwise, it’s simply a matter of time until one expires and causes a debilitating outage. CIOs need greater visibility, intelligence and automation of the entire life cycle of all certificates to do this. Since certificates control authentication and communication between machines, it is important not to let them expire unexpectedly. And because the symptoms of a machine identity-related outage mimic many other hardware and software failures, diagnosing them is notoriously time-consuming and difficult.”