5 Machine Identity Mistakes That Could Cost You Millions
Apr 22, 2025
Introduction
Let’s face it: the more machines you have in your environment—containers, APIs, services, bots, IoT devices—the more exposed your business becomes to identity-related risk.
Machine identities are exploding in both volume and importance, yet many organizations still treat them like second-class citizens compared to user identities.
That’s a dangerous mistake. Machine identities are now central to DevOps, automation, and service-to-service communication. But when they’re mismanaged, they can open the door to credential leaks, outages, compliance failures—and seven-figure breach costs.
In this post, we’ll break down the five most common machine identity mistakes, what they cost you, and exactly how to fix them. We’ll also show how platforms like Natoma are helping security and DevOps teams stay ahead of the curve by automating non-human identity management at scale.
Mistake #1: Treating Machine Identity Management Like an Afterthought
Why it happens:
Humans are often considered to be the weakest point of entry for a security breach. Naturally, that means that most teams focus on securing human identities—using MFA, SSO, and IAM platforms. But when it comes to service accounts, API keys, and certificates, management is often manual, inconsistent, or siloed.
That’s because traditional IAM tools weren’t designed for non-human identities.
Why it’s a problem:
Machine identities often outnumber humans 45:1.
They run 24/7 and usually have elevated privileges.
They’re often overlooked in audits and monitoring tools.
These identities can lead to lateral movement in the event of a breach.
One leaked token or expired cert can shut down critical services or allow unauthorized access for months.
How Natoma helps:
Natoma treats non-human identities as first-class citizens. It automates the issuance, renewal, and revocation of machine credentials—including API keys, service account credentials, and ephemeral certificates—across clouds and CI/CD pipelines.
Bottom line: Ignoring machine identities is no longer an option. Treat them with the same (or greater) rigor as human accounts.
Mistake #2: Hardcoding Secrets in Code or Config Files
Why it happens:
Hardcoding is convenient. It makes scripts easy to deploy, credentials easy to find, and testing fast.
But it’s also a breach waiting to happen.
What it costs you:
Exposed secrets in GitHub or container images
Lack of visibility into where credentials are used
No ability to rotate or revoke access on the fly
According to Verizon’s DBIR, over 60% of breaches involve stolen credentials—many of them from machine identities.
How Natoma helps:
Natoma decouples credentials from code. It delivers short-lived secrets on-demand and replaces static credentials with dynamically generated tokens. That means no more hardcoded values, and a lot fewer secrets hiding in plain sight.
Pro tip: Rotate all secrets automatically and make ephemeral credentials the default for non-human access.
Mistake #3: Letting Expired Certificates Break Production
Why it happens:
Certificate expiration isn’t glamorous. It’s easy to forget. And in complex environments, it’s almost impossible to track manually.
But when a machine identity tied to a TLS certificate expires, it can:
Take down APIs
Break customer-facing services
Erode trust in your brand
Outages due to expired certs have even hit brands like LinkedIn, Google, and Microsoft. No one is immune.
How Natoma helps:
Natoma continuously monitors certificate lifecycles and renews them before expiration. Whether it’s a long-lived TLS cert or a short-lived SPIFFE identity, Natoma ensures your services stay up and secure—no midnight fire drills.
Takeaway: Certificate automation isn’t optional anymore. It’s critical uptime insurance.
Mistake #4: Failing to Track Ownership and Usage
Why it happens:
In most orgs, machine identities are spun up by developers, ignored by security, and forgotten by everyone.
There’s no single source of truth for:
Who owns this service account?
What does this API key access?
Is this credential still in use?
This creates identity sprawl and an audit nightmare.
What it costs you:
Orphaned accounts with no owner
Forgotten credentials with wide access
Failed compliance checks and security audits
How Natoma helps:
Natoma provides a continuous inventory of all machine identities across clouds and hybrid environments. Every service account, token, or certificate has a defined owner, a usage record, and a policy for renewal and revocation.
Result: Zero orphaned credentials. Full accountability. And compliance teams that actually smile during audits.
Mistake #5: Using the Same Credential Across Environments
Why it happens:
Dev, test, and prod environments are often managed by different teams with different cybersecurity maturity levels. To “keep things simple,” many teams reuse credentials across environments.
That’s a massive security risk.
Real-world implications:
If a dev credential is compromised, and that credential works in prod… it’s game over.
Reused credentials make it easy for attackers to escalate privilege and move laterally through your systems.
How Natoma helps:
Natoma enforces environment-aware credential policies. It ensures that machine identities used in dev, staging, and prod are completely isolated—with different tokens, lifecycles, and access scopes.
Security best practice: Never reuse credentials across environments. Rotate them independently and scope them by purpose.
Final Thoughts
Machine identities aren’t a niche problem—they’re one of the biggest blind spots in enterprise security today.
Whether you're a CISO, a DevOps engineer, or someone tasked with securing critical infrastructure, ignoring machine identity risks is no longer an option.
The good news? Fixing these five mistakes doesn’t require a massive overhaul. It just takes the right platform and some smart automation.
Natoma helps you:
Discover every machine identity across your infrastructure
Automate issuance, rotation, and revocation
Enforce policy and reduce human error
Machine identity is the new perimeter. Start managing it like your business depends on it—because it does.