Learn why unmanaged machine identities are driving compliance failures, and how to stay ahead.
Key Insights
- Machine identities outnumber humans by up to 100× (KuppingerCole), and most teams admit they can’t govern them.
- Audit failures are rising because of unmanaged service accounts, certificates, and IoT devices.
- Modern PAM and automation close the gap, giving compliance leaders the visibility and control auditors demand.
The Identity Shift Reshaping Compliance
From ephemeral workloads to sprawling multicloud environments, machine identities are multiplying at a rate that human governance simply can’t keep up with. These digital identities include service accounts, digital certificates, API keys, containers, IoT devices, and workloads — all of which interact more frequently and often with higher privileges than human users.
But what makes machine identities especially dangerous for compliance teams is not only their scale. It’s the visibility gaps, unclear ownership, and lack of lifecycle control that create blind spots where risk thrives, opening the door to unauthorized access and exposure of sensitive data.
In our recent expert panel with IDMWORKS, we explored how organizations can address these challenges head-on by integrating Privileged Access Management (PAM), process automation, and unified management strategies for security and compliance.
The Machine Identity Crisis Is Real
Industry research shows that machine identities organizations now manage more non-human accounts than human ones, and the risks are mounting. Key findings reveal that:
- 69% of organizations now manage more machine identities than human ones. (SailPoint)
- Most identity professionals say machine identities are harder to govern, due to poor internal processes and inadequate tools.
- Many report higher manual workloads compared to human identity management.
- Auditing machine identities is increasingly difficult, largely due to unclear ownership and limited visibility.
- A significant percentage believe machine identities pose higher security risks than human users.
This paints a sobering picture: without modernization, enterprises are heading toward a compliance cliff.
And the consequences are not theoretical. Consider the Starlink global outage, caused by expired digital certificates at ground stations. A single point of failure, rooted in certificate mismanagement, disrupted connectivity worldwide. This is exactly why automated lifecycle oversight, backed by public key infrastructure (PKI) best practices, is no longer optional.
Why PAM Is the Missing Link
Privileged Access Management, once considered a solution for controlling human access only, has now evolved into the foundation for machine identity management and security.
Modern PAM platforms go far beyond vaulting credentials. They provide:
- Discovery of unmanaged identities across hybrid and multicloud environments, including IoT devices.
- Policy enforcement for privileged service accounts.
- Secrets and digital certificate lifecycle automation, reducing the risk of outages, unauthorized access, or audit failures.
- Audit trails that align with compliance frameworks such as SOX, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and NIST.
- Integration with multi-factor authentication (MFA) for stronger assurance.
In short, PAM delivers the two things compliance teams need most: visibility and operational control — essential to protect machine identities and defend sensitive data.
The Case for a Unified Strategy
Fragmented tools and processes are one of the biggest obstacles organizations face in the management and security of machine identities. Industry leaders highlight just how much organizations stand to gain by consolidating their approach:
- Stronger security of devices and workloads, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
- Fewer outages caused by expired or mismanaged digital certificates.
- Improved overall business continuity through identity and access management (IAM) best practices.
Yet, despite these clear benefits, only a minority of organizations today have standardized management strategies for machine identities. This gap represents both a major risk and a massive opportunity for improvement.
Building Toward Compliance Resilience
So how can organizations close the gap? A modern strategy should include four core pillars:
- Discover - The first step in resilience is visibility. Digital identities often hide in servers, containers, DevOps pipelines, cloud workloads, IoT devices, and even in source code. Without a complete inventory, governance and compliance are impossible. Discovery ensures no identity is left unmanaged.
- Govern - Discovery must be followed by control. Governance introduces ownership, policy enforcement, access controls, and traceability. By embedding best practices such as regular access reviews, MFA enforcement, and compliance checks, organizations prevent unmanaged accounts and secrets from slipping through audits.
- Automate - Manual processes cannot keep up with the velocity of machine identities. Automation reduces human error and strengthens compliance by orchestrating provisioning, deprovisioning, integrations, secret rotation, and digital certificate lifecycle management. Just-In-Time (JIT) access enforces the principle of least privilege dynamically.
- Management - True resilience is continuous. Beyond governance and automation, organizations must focus on security hygiene, least privilege enforcement, cleanup of stale identities, and posture monitoring. Advanced practices such as Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR) and behavioral analytics add a final layer of defense — ensuring compliance is not a checkbox, but a living capability.
The Road Ahead
Machine identities will only continue to multiply. With the rise of microservices, IoT devices, and AI-driven workloads, this growth will be exponential. That’s why enterprises must act now to modernize governance, or risk falling further behind.
The lesson is clear: identity security cannot stop at humans. Digital identities must be treated with the same rigor — if not more — to meet regulatory standards, protect sensitive data, and ensure resilience against outages and breaches.
Your Next Steps
Here’s a quick toolkit of resources security leaders are using to stay ahead of machine identity compliance risks:
- eBook: Machine Identities – Your Biggest Blind Spot for Compliance RiskExplore how service accounts, secrets, and digital certificates evade traditional controls — and what to do about it. [Read the eBook]
- eBook: Identity Security Intelligence – A Modern Defender’s PlaybookDiscover how automation, PKI, and behavior analytics are helping security leaders get ahead of modern identity threats. [Get the Playbook]
- Infographic: Certificate Chaos Is Coming – Get Ready for ItUnderstand why upcoming changes in certificate validity will make manual renewal impossible — and how automation can save you. [See the Infographic]
Final Thought
Machine identities may be invisible, but their impact is not. By combining PAM, automation, MFA, and unified management strategies, compliance leaders can transform today’s hidden risks into tomorrow’s resilience advantage.
