Among other findings, 83% of organisations have suffered a certificate-related outage during the last twelve months (with 26% saying critical systems were impacted, and 57% have experienced security incidents or breaches related to compromised machine identities.

And 64% of CIOs said they use multiple products and processes – sometimes spreadsheets – to manage machine identities instead of a comprehensive management product.

Machine identity is central to secure communication and authentication between machines, which can be everything from servers and applications to cloud instances and algorithms.

"Like never before, we're witnessing a huge explosion in the number of machines used by businesses," said Venafi vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence Kevin Bocek.

"As technology continues to drive streamlined business operations, providing machines with strong identity and authentication is essential. Yet this growth is causing an uncontrolled sprawl of identities. The end result is the attack surface is widening and outages are on the rise. And it's only going to get worse with the proliferation of machine identities and increased complexities – particularly with the growing adoption of more cloud-native environments, which make it harder for developers to gain visibility."

He added "The numbers speak for themselves – managing machine identities cannot be done in a manual and disjointed way. Organisations need a central view to manage these risks, or the business will suffer.

"The research is clear – the need for automation is essential to reduce risk and allow developers to concentrate on innovation. Implementing a machine identity management solution which automates the management of machine identities throughout their lifecycle and in any environment is the only way forward. "

Venafi's survey was conducted by Coleman Parkes Research, and involved 1000 CIOs in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Australia and New Zealand.