A Fundamental Disconnect: DevOps Outpacing X.509 Certificate Management

Accelerate DevOps by Offering a Machine Identity Service

Digital transformation — driven by cloud computing, modern architecture such as containers, VMs, microservices and DevOps practices — requires new approaches to security, demanding the protection of machine identities that enable authentication and encryption required for secure machine-to-machine communication. Digital communication uses X.509 certificates that serve as identities for all components of the modern application infrastructure stack. However, the rapid consumption of certificates across the heterogeneous groups, networks and systems needed to support DevOps and applications in the cloud presents new and significant challenges.

This paper will discuss real-world machine identity protection challenges facing security and DevOps practitioners as well as best practices that allow organizations to scale digital certificate provisioning.

When done correctly, this approach allows organizations to embrace digital transformation and DevOps while also gaining visibility, automation and control of all machine identities across the enterprise.