The number of machines enterprise security teams have to manage is exploding.
When it comes to computing infrastructure, servers have been supplanted by virtual machines, which then evolved into containers, which are now evolving into serverless cloud functions.
Then there’s the exponential growth in IoT devices, which puts Internet connectivity and brains into machines that used to be relatively dumb and isolated, like printers, cameras, and door locks. According to Cisco, there were 20 billion devices connected to the Internet in 2021, and this number will jump to 29 billion by 2023.
At the same time, more employees are working from home, or in hybrid arrangements, meaning that there’s now an army of vulnerable consumer devices that could potentially serve as entry points into corporate networks.
It’s no surprise that, last fall, Gartner named machine identity one of the top five cybersecurity and risk trends of the year.
