Ninety-six percent of companies believe in effectively shielding machine and human identities but 80% of them struggle with important machine ID protection, according to a Forrester Consulting study for Venafi.

The Salt Lake City based cybersecurity provider commissioned the June 2018 study, "Securing The Enterprise With Machine Identity Protection," which included responses from 350 senior IT security professionals, 26% from financial services, who are responsible for their organizations' identity and access management from the U.S., U.K., Germany, France and Australia.

"It is shocking that so many companies don't understand the importance of protecting their machine identities. We spend billions of dollars protecting user names and passwords but almost nothing protecting the keys and certificates that machines use to identify and authenticate themselves," Venafi CEO Jeff Hudson explained. She added, "The number of machines on enterprise networks is skyrocketing and most organizations haven't invested in the intelligence or automation necessary to protect these critical security assets. The bad guys know this, and they are targeting them because they are incredibly valuable assets across a wide range of cyberattacks."