Topic starter
20/04/2026 7:30 pm
TL;DR: Machine identity sprawl is turning certificate expiry, orphaned keys, and manual tracking into outage and compliance risks, with Palo Alto Networks citing 83% of organisations experiencing a certificate-related outage in the past 24 months. The governance problem is no longer theoretical: visibility, ownership, and automation now determine whether machine identities support resilience or create hidden failure points.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Palo Alto Networks: “The Invisible Threat: Machine Identity Sprawl and Expired Certificates”.
By the numbers:
- 83% of organisations have experienced a certificate-related outage in the past 24 months.
- Machine identities now outnumber humans 82:1 across apps, APIs, servers and workloads.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when machine identities have no clear owner?
A: When machine identities have no clear owner, offboarding, remediation, and accountability all fail together.
Q: Why do expired certificates create such a high operational risk?
A: Expired certificates can break authentication, encrypted sessions, and service-to-service trust at the same time, which makes them availability and security issues rather than simple maintenance misses.
Q: How do security teams know whether machine identity governance is actually working?
A: They should be able to answer three questions quickly: who owns each credential, what system it protects, and when it expires or rotates.
Practitioner guidance
- Define ownership for every machine identity Map each certificate, SSH key, code signing certificate and secret to a named business or platform owner, then tie that owner to renewal and revocation duties.
- Automate discovery and renewal workflows Replace spreadsheet tracking with automated inventory, expiry monitoring and policy-based renewal across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments.
- Separate high-risk credential classes Track TLS certificates, SSH keys, code signing certificates and API secrets as distinct lifecycle classes because each expires, rotates and fails differently.
Bottom line: Machine identity sprawl turns certificates, keys and secrets into a lifecycle governance problem that can interrupt services when ownership is unclear.
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This topic was modified 6 months ago by NHI Mgmt Group
This topic was modified 1 day ago by NHI Mgmt Group
10/10/2026 11:29 pm
Machine identity sprawl is an identity governance problem before it is a certificate problem. The operational pain appears as expiry and outages, but the root issue is that organisations have created more machine identities than their governance model can inventory, own and renew. That turns lifecycle management into a resilience dependency. Practitioners should treat machine identity governance as an estate-wide control discipline, not an IT maintenance task.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Companies are dedicating an average of 32.4% of their security budgets to secrets management and code security, with US organisations leading at 40.8%, according to the State of Secrets in AppSec.
- 54% of organisations are dissatisfied with their current secrets management solution because not all secrets are secured, and 43% cite lack of central management, according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
A question worth separating out:
A: Manual tracking relies on spreadsheets, scripts, and human follow-up to find, renew, and revoke certificates. Automated lifecycle management continuously discovers cryptographic assets, applies policy to issuance and renewal, and supports fast remediation when something changes. The practical difference is scale and reliability. Automation reduces error, shortens exposure windows, and helps sustain compliance as environments grow.
👉 Read our full editorial: Machine identity sprawl and expired certificates are breaking uptime