The Venafi study found that in the last six months, 36% of financial organizations experienced an outage that impacted critical business applications or services.
The biggest fear comes from reputational damage due to an outage, while 34 percent worry about growing interdependencies between technology and services, which would make future outages more painful.
The study surveyed more than 100 chief information officers in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia to obtain the results and almost all managers agreed that the use of certificates would increase d ‘at least 25 percent over the next five years.
This year, organizations will spend nearly $10 billion to protect and manage passwords, but will spend almost nothing to protect digital certificates on machines.
These certificates serve as machine identities to communicate securely with other machines and gain authorized access to applications and services.
The average outage in a Global 5000 organization can cost US$5,600 per minute, while larger networks with a more severe outage can cost US$500,000 per hour.
Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, said organizations across industries are struggling with these outages, but the problems are most pronounced in the financial realm.
“The entire industry is focused on trust, performance and reliability, and therefore cannot afford service interruptions. At the same time, the sector has been transformed by open banking initiatives,” he said.
As a result, organizations are relying more on machine identities, Bocek said, but often without putting adequate security in place.
“Unfortunately, these critical security assets are often unmanaged and unprotected, even though they protect mobile applications, containerization initiatives and cloud architectures. »
