This article is based on reporting originally published by digitaljournal.com, drawing on a report by cybersecurity company Venafi titled “The Machine Identity Crisis: How the explosion of machines is affecting the security of machine-to-machine communications,” hosted by Data Breach Today.
DevOps Is Becoming a Core Business Priority
DevOps and Fast IT adoption have been identified as two of the most significant growth areas in enterprise technology. According to a report from Venafi, a privately held cybersecurity company, this growth is being propelled by the widespread adoption of cloud computing and the operational benefits it brings: speed, agility, efficiency, and economies of scale.
While the Venafi report focuses primarily on security vulnerabilities in machine-to-machine communications, it also highlights how dramatically the pace of software delivery has accelerated — and why that acceleration is reshaping how engineering teams operate.
What Is DevOps (and Why Is It Sometimes Called Fast IT)?
DevOps is a broad set of concepts and cultural practices centered on building, evolving, and operating rapidly-changing, resilient systems at scale. As defined by Agile Admin, it encompasses “the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.”
The term Fast IT is sometimes used interchangeably with DevOps, emphasizing the speed at which software can be delivered when development and operations teams work in close collaboration. Both terms point to the same underlying shift: breaking down silos between teams and enabling faster, safer software delivery.
In practice, DevOps brings together popular frameworks and methodologies so they work in concert across the entire systems-development lifecycle. The result is a pipeline that supports:
- Agile development — iterative, incremental delivery of software in smaller, manageable segments
- Continuous integration (CI) — automatically building and testing code changes as they are committed
- Continuous delivery (CD) — ensuring code is always in a deployable state, ready for release at any time
Containers and Microservices: The Engine Behind Fast IT
A key enabler of Fast IT is the use of containers — cloud-based, self-contained runtime environments that package an application and all its dependencies together. Containers allow teams to run applications reliably across different computing environments without worrying about configuration drift or dependency conflicts.
Containers work hand-in-hand with microservices — an architectural approach where an application is broken into small, independently deployable modules. Rather than deploying one large monolithic application, teams deploy and update individual services independently, dramatically reducing the risk and complexity of each release.
Together, containers and microservices allow engineering teams to release software faster, recover from failures more quickly, and scale individual components of an application without scaling the entire system.
Container Adoption: A Signal of DevOps Maturity
As a measure of how rapidly DevOps practices were being adopted, the Venafi report cited a Gartner projection — made around mid-2018 — that 50 percent of enterprises would be running containers in production environments by the end of that year. A significant driver of this growth was the explosion of Internet of Things (IoT)-generated data, which placed new demands on scalable, modular infrastructure.
This rapid proliferation of containerized workloads and connected machines directly increased the complexity of infrastructure — and with it, the number of machines that needed to communicate securely with one another.
The Security Challenge: Machine Identity at Scale
The Venafi report’s central concern is what happens to security when the number of machines — containers, virtual machines, IoT devices, APIs — grows exponentially. Each machine that communicates with another must be authenticated. This is handled through machine identities: cryptographic credentials such as TLS/SSL certificates and SSH keys that verify a machine is who it claims to be.
As DevOps pipelines scale and containers spin up and down dynamically, managing these machine identities becomes genuinely difficult. The risks include:
- Certificates expiring unnoticed, causing outages
- Poorly managed SSH keys granting unauthorized access
- Lack of visibility into which machines hold which credentials
- Insufficient automation for certificate issuance and renewal at container speed
For DevOps teams, this means that security practices must evolve alongside delivery pipelines. Automating certificate lifecycle management and integrating secrets management tools into CI/CD workflows are increasingly important steps for teams running containers in production.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams
- DevOps and cloud adoption are deeply linked — the speed and scale that cloud enables are primary drivers of DevOps growth.
- Containers and microservices are central to Fast IT, enabling faster releases and more resilient systems.
- Rapid container proliferation introduces machine identity management as a critical — and often overlooked — security discipline.
- DevOps maturity requires security to be embedded in the pipeline (DevSecOps), not bolted on after deployment.
The growth trajectory for DevOps practices has only continued since this report was published in 2018. For teams still building out their pipelines, the fundamentals remain the same: automate delivery, embrace incremental change, and treat security as a first-class concern from day one.