The number of machines on enterprise networks is rapidly rising with the increase in number of applications and services hosted by the machines. In this era of cloud computing, the DevOps teams independently deploy software applications which create a constant flow of compact machines. These machines are deployed, changed and destroyed in moments at machine speed.
According to The Machine Identity Crisis report by cybersecurity leader Venafi, the devices and applications globally are growing very faster than the human population. The four top trends driving the growth of machine volume are cloud adoption, DevOps continuous progression, mobile device growth, and IoT device extension.
Top trends driving growth of machine volume:
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Dynamism of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing helps companies to get their apps up and run them faster, reduce maintenance, improve manageability, and continuously adjust resources to meet fluctuations in business.
In the cloud environments, the machines automatically create, configure and destroy themselves according to business demands. Hence, with the rapid rise in cloud adoption, the machine volume globally has significantly grown.
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DevOps Adoption
Like cloud, the DevOps also provides a lot of benefits to businesses, including speed, agility, efficiency, and economics of scale.
The DevOps reduces the latency in software development, and accelerate the delivery of software-driven business solutions. The IT developers use software containers to run applications that contains microservices. According to Venifa, the evolution of DevOps has sped up the creation of machines, and made the security of machine-to-machine communication a little more complex.
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Upsurge in IoT Devices
Internet of things (IoT) devices includes a broad range of physical devices with embedded electronics, software, sensors, etc. These devices play a major role in managing the critical infrastructure like smart devices, intelligent transportation systems, health monitoring, and notification systems.
Businesses are increasingly adopting IoT solutions because of lower operational costs and increased productivity. According to Gartner, there will be 25 billion IoT devices in the world by 2020, accounting for 70% of the total devices on internet.
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Growing Number of Mobile Devices
Mobile devices are the ideal definition of physical machines, which have been around for years. Even though the adoption of mobile devices is slowing, the number of these continues to increase.
There will be more than 16 billion mobile devices globally in 2020, from 11 billion in 2016.
Suggested reading: Top trends in app development, DevOps maturity, and low-code adoption
Venafi highlighted in its report that securing and protecting the data flowing through the machines is an ongoing challenge for enterprises. IT and security teams are concerned about the protection of machine identities. Intelligent automation is one solution for businesses to protect their data.
The clear visibility into all the machine identities that passes the networks can help organizations to detect the cyberattacks, automatically remediate the vulnerabilities and secure the machine to machine communications.
Download the full report here.
