Principles such as Zero Trust and the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) rely on a core assumption: every digital identity must be uniquely identified, managed, and controlled. While organizations traditionally focused on human users, machine identities have become central to modern security architecture. The primary reason is that cloud services, APIs, microservices, containers, and AI agents have eliminated traditional network perimeters. In this sense, machines transcend the boundaries of infrastructure and can no longer be managed through conventional firewalls. However, effective management of machine identities is by no means simple, and several common pitfalls must be carefully avoided. It is important to get the fundamentals right. In most organizations, protection of employee digital identity has reached a satisfactory level in recent years thanks to the widespread adoption of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and passkeys. They have a mechanism that offers greater resistance to phishing attacks and is cryptographically secured. Ideally, a single IAM platform manages the digital identities of both employees and machines. However, registration and authentication procedures for machine identities differ fundamentally. Modern identity is typically shaped by the surrounding infrastructure.
ComputerWeekly.de