Growth Drivers | October 14, 2025

Securing the machines behind the machines

By Martin Reilly, Digital Identity Offering Manager at DXC Technology

We live in an increasingly connected world — from wearables on our wrists and smart devices in our homes to connected vehicles and intelligent infrastructure that power our cities and keep our societies moving.   
 
Our physical world is filled with connected devices, while the digital world of cloud services and digital twins integrates them to generate massive amounts of data at scale. But data is only valuable if it can be trusted. Trusted digital interactions and transactions require knowing who and what we are interacting with. That’s why one of today’s most urgent challenges is managing the machine identities that modern digital infrastructure relies on.  

Just as employees swipe an ID badge to enter a building, machines use digital certificates and cryptographic keys to authenticate and authorize access to digital systems. These credentials function like ID badges for servers, apps, cloud services and connected devices.

Learning from past weaknesses to create a stronger future

I recall a particularly costly incident. 

A few years ago, a Europe-based telecommunications provider came to DXC when its systems suddenly stopped working. Customers couldn’t make phone calls or send emails. Business operations had ground to a halt.

The DXC team quickly traced the outage to a single point of failure. For years, one employee had manually renewed the digital certificates that kept the company’s servers running. This process worked until he retired early, and no one took over the task. It went unnoticed for six months until the certificates expired and everything stopped working.

Carving a path forward to reduce risk  

The incident I described highlights a critical lesson: To protect operations and reduce risk, organizations must automate how they manage and maintain digital credentials. 

Manual processes aren’t just slow, but they’re also fragile, error-prone and increasingly unsustainable, especially with how fast machine identities are multiplying. 

In the telecom provider’s case, DXC not only restored operations quickly, but also put safeguards in place to prevent future outages. By automating the tracking and renewal of machine identities, DXC helped eliminate reliance on a single employee, ensuring business continuity and reducing risk.

Automating certificate management is essential

TLS certificates that secure web servers currently expire after 398 days. By 2026, that window will shrink to 200 days; by 2027, to 100; and by 2029, to just 47.

For organizations managing thousands — even tens of thousands — of endpoints, that change means a twelve-fold increase in renewals. Manual processes can’t keep up. While shorter certificate lifespans strengthen security, they also create serious operational challenges.  

Managing the machine identity boom from agentic AI

Managing cyber risk is becoming more complex with the rise of agentic AI.  

Each autonomous agent — whether ordering equipment for a factory manager or authorizing payments for a billing supervisor — needs its own credential to securely access APIs, databases and other systems. Manual oversight can’t keep up.

To handle the scale and speed of these interactions, organizations must adopt automated systems that can track and update machine identities in real time. This approach aligns with DXC's Zero Trust security model, built on the principle of never trust, always verify.

Preparing machine identities for the quantum threat

Although still in its early stages, quantum computing already poses serious risks alongside its benefits. Its speed and power could eventually break the cryptographic algorithms that secure machine identities and digital communications across enterprise networks.

To manage the risks ahead, organizations must embrace crypto agility, the ability to rapidly switch to stronger encryption when current methods become outdated or vulnerable. 

Automation is a key to crypto agility. It enables organizations to deploy new crypto algorithms and refresh keys and certificates before a new vulnerability can disrupt operations.

Go deeper

• The power and promise of digital identity [DXC Insights]

• Putting zero trust to work [DXC Insights]

• Learn more about DXC's work in digital identity

• Learn how DXC Key and Certificate Services delivers trust and quantum readiness