Digital trust and identity sprawl: what IAM teams need now

TL;DR: Digital trust has shifted from certificate hygiene to an executive IT imperative as cloud services, hybrid workloads, remote access and zero trust expand the connected surface area, according to DigiCert. The governance challenge is that trust now depends on identity, integrity and encryption across people, machines and services, not just websites and documents.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by DigiCert: Digital Trust as an IT Imperative

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams govern digital trust across people, workloads and devices?

A: Security teams should govern digital trust as a shared control domain that covers identity, integrity and encryption across all entity types.

Q: Why do certificates matter to IAM and NHI programmes?

A: Certificates matter because they bind cryptographic keys to identity claims for both humans and non-human entities.

Q: When does digital trust become a governance risk instead of an infrastructure detail?

A: Digital trust becomes a governance risk when trust artefacts are distributed across cloud, DevOps, partner and device environments without consistent lifecycle controls.

Practitioner guidance

• Map trust controls to identity classes Inventory where certificates, tokens and other trust artefacts secure humans, workloads, devices and services.
• Bring certificate lifecycle into IAM governance Include certificate expiry, rotation and revocation in access review and control testing routines, especially for CI/CD pipelines and cloud services where the blast radius of stale trust is high.
• Extend trust checks across supplier and partner handoffs Require continuous validation of identity, provenance and certificate status at every external integration point.

What's in the full article

DigiCert's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• How DigiCert defines the four building blocks of digital trust in its own operating model.
• The specific role DigiCert assigns to standards bodies such as CA/Browser Forum, NIST and IETF.
• The way DigiCert links certificate lifecycle management to business process automation and reduced outages.
• The source article's own examples of connected trust across device lifecycles, software supply chains and digital rights provenance.

👉 Read DigiCert's full blog post on digital trust as an IT imperative →

Digital trust and identity sprawl: what IAM teams need now?

Explore further

View Full Forum →  |  NHI Foundation Course →