Posted by Suresh Sathyamurthy
October 15, 2024
Today, we unveiled the world’s first Unified Secrets & Machine Identity Platform—transforming how organizations safeguard against the leading cause of cybersecurity breaches: compromised credentials and stolen secrets. This fully integrated secrets and machine identity management solution marks a turning point in enterprise security, ensuring robust protection against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
The Cybersecurity Challenge of Our Time
Despite substantial investments in cybersecurity, enterprises continue to fall victim to high-profile breaches. Alarmingly, the primary cause of these breaches remains consistent: compromised identities and stolen credentials1. According to recent data, over 83%2 of organizations have suffered breaches due to compromised identities.
The scope of this problem extends beyond human users. Machine identities—representing devices, workloads, applications, and automation processes—far exceed human identities in number and complexity. With an average ratio of 453 machine identities for every human identity, enterprises grapple with billions of secrets and credentials used to authenticate these machine connections. The fragmentation and lack of security for these identities make enterprises highly vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Where Current Approaches Fall Short
The prevailing approach to identity and secrets management is fragmented, with over 12 categories of tools offered by 70+ vendors. Enterprises often stack new tools to address gaps, but this only increases complexity and costs while creating blind spots. The resulting patchwork solution often fails to deliver comprehensive visibility and governance over secrets and machine identities, resulting in an increase in both breaches and security expenses.
In this first of our new “Executive Conversations” series with Akeyless CEO Oded Hareven, cybersecurity veteran Admiral Mike Rogers explains some of these risks, and why scalability, integration and, above all, simplicity are necessary to win the battle for more secure machine identities.
A Unified Solution: The Akeyless Platform
To tackle these challenges head-on, Akeyless is proud to announce the first-ever Unified Secrets & Machine Identity Management Platform. This cloud-native SaaS solution brings together Secrets Management, Certificate Lifecycle Management, Encryption Key Management, a virtual HSM in the form of Distributed Fragments Cryptography (DFC™), Next-Generation PAM, and the Universal Secrets Connector—all in one place.
The Akeyless platform has been designed to answer the needs of enterprises addressed in Gartner’s “Machine Identity Fabric,” pictured below, with components that address each of the major functionality requirements for machine identity security.
Built for scale, Akeyless provides a unified interface to manage all secrets and machine identities through a single pane of glass, effectively replacing numerous disjointed solutions with one seamless, efficient platform. This cloud-native SaaS platform is powered by Akeyless Distributed Fragments Cryptography (DFC), ensuring robust cryptographic operations across all environments without compromising control over sensitive information.
Key Benefits of the Unified Approach
The Akeyless platform offers three core advantages that redefine secrets and machine identity management:
- Enhanced Visibility and Control:
- Akeyless delivers a unified orchestration of multiple tools via a single UI and API, ensuring complete visibility into all secrets and machine identities.
- The Universal Secrets Connector extends this visibility to third-party vaults, simplifying management and governance of secrets across environments.
- Improved Efficiency:
- By unifying multiple tools into a cloud-native SaaS platform, Akeyless reduces complexity and operating costs, with enterprises benefiting from up to 70% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and faster ROI.
- Automated workflows for scanning and managing secrets will also be introduced in upcoming updates, further streamlining operations.
- Proactive Security:
- The platform employs a zero-knowledge, secretless approach using DFC, ensuring that only clients have ownership of their data.
- Akeyless also integrates advanced features like automatic secret rotation, short-lived credentials, and OIDC Tokens, which provide dynamic and secure identity management for machines.
Why Akeyless Leads the Industry
The Akeyless Unified Platform stands out due to its unique capabilities:
- All-in-One Integration: The platform provides a fully integrated, cloud-native solution for secrets and machine identity management. It covers all related use cases through a single interface, eliminating the need for disparate tools and reducing operational complexity.
- Zero-Knowledge Security Model: Akeyless uses a patented Distributed Fragments Cryptography (DFC) approach that ensures a zero-knowledge model, meaning that no one but the customer has access to sensitive data. This guarantees full data privacy and security.
- Ease of Deployment and Scalability: As a SaaS offering, Akeyless is easy to deploy and scale, making it suitable for organizations of all sizes. The platform’s unified design drastically cuts down on maintenance costs and enables faster time to value.
- Secretless Authentication Mechanisms: Akeyless embraces a secretless approach to authentication by using ephemeral credentials, short-lived certificates, and OIDC tokens, which minimizes the risk of secret leakage and simplifies identity management across dynamic environments.
- Single-Pane-of-Glass Management: The platform is designed for managing multi-cloud environments seamlessly. It provides centralized control over secrets and machine identities, offering full visibility without the hassle of fragmented tools and interfaces.
The Proof Is in the Adoption
The Akeyless Unified Platform already protects some of the world’s largest companies, including major players in the banking, insurance, cloud storage, retail, manufacturing and pharmaceutical industries. Currently, 25% of our customers have already fully adopted multiple products in the platform and almost half are exploring more solutions with us —testament to the value of an integrated, unified approach to secrets and machine identity management.
A Vision for the Future
With the rising adoption of cloud and automation technologies, machine identities are proliferating at an unprecedented rate. Akeyless is at the forefront of addressing this challenge, providing the industry’s first truly unified solution, reducing complexity, and giving organizations the control and security they need in an increasingly dynamic digital landscape.
Join Us
Be part of the future of cybersecurity with the Akeyless Unified Secrets & Machine Identity Platform. Experience unparalleled visibility, efficiency, and security—all with the power of a single integrated solution. Click here to learn more or see a demo.
References
- Verizon, 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report (Verizon Enterprise Solutions, 2024), https://www.verizon.com/business/en-gb/resources/reports/dbir/.
- Silverfort, State of the Identity Attack Surface (2023), https://www.silverfort.com/state-of-identity-attack-surface-2023.
- CyberArk,CyberArk 2023 Identity Security Threat Landscape Report (2023), https://www.cyberark.com/resources/ebooks/cyberark-2023-identity-security-threat-landscape-report.
