Cyber attacks today are increasingly sophisticated and aggressive, leaving organizations fighting to stay at least one step ahead of hackers to protect their critical data assets. Identity and access management (IAM) solutions are part of an overall security strategy that helps organizations control access to their cloud infrastructure, applications, servers, and both structured and unstructured data. These solutions manage the identities assigned to interactive, human users fairly well, but do a poor job of managing the typically larger number of identities assigned to the automated processes that drive much of the computing in large-scale data centers. These non-human identities continue to grow, which means that IAM implementations are not addressing the majority of identities present in an enterprise – the identities performing the bulk of operations.
A secure encrypted channel is needed for machine-to-machine (M2M) data transfers. For this reason, most of the identities that enable M2M processes use Secure Shell (SSH) for authentication and authorization. For example, an automated process that retrieves server log data requires an authenticated and authorized connection to each server, plus a secure channel to move the log data to a centralized processing application. Secure Shell is ideal for these functions because: