Across every sector, from manufacturing and healthcare to automotive, energy and critical infrastructure, organisations are facing a rapidly growing challenge: how to secure millions of connected devices without expanding security teams, budgets or risk exposure. Machine identities have become the backbone of trust for IoT and OT ecosystems, yet most organisations still manage them manually or through fragmented, supplier-led processes. Business leaders must recognize that securing machine identities is a strategic business issue impacting compliance, financial outcomes, and overall business performance.

The result? Hidden costs, expanding attack surfaces, compliance gaps and operational inefficiencies. Manual certificate management introduces significant risks and costs, including the potential for human error, increased manual effort, and greater vulnerability to security breaches and non-compliance. Device Authority’s ROI Calculator was designed to reveal these costs clearly, helping organisations understand the economic value of automating machine identity management, rather than treating it as a technical overhead. The July newsletter reinforces this shift, highlighting how KeyScaler 2025 simplifies lifecycle management and reduces the operational burden associated with unmanaged devices.

This article explores the real financial impact of machine identity automation, why traditional approaches are unsustainable, and how to calculate tangible ROI using modern tools. Security investments in machine identity management are not just a cost, but a business enabler—quantifying return on investment is essential for justifying and maximizing the value of these initiatives.

Why Machine Identity Has Become a Hidden Cost Centre

Machine identity management involves far more than issuing certificates. It encompasses:

• Onboarding devices into trust frameworks
• Issuing and rotating cryptographic keys
• Authenticating devices to the cloud
• Enforcing Zero Trust policies
• Supporting secure update workflows
• Revoking compromised identities
• Maintaining compliance evidence
• Securing credentials at scale
• Managing machine identities for both human and non human identities, including service accounts, to ensure operational efficiency, security, and compliance

When organisations try to manage these tasks manually or through disjointed PKI systems, the costs accumulate quietly but significantly. Public key infrastructure (PKI) plays a critical role in issuing, managing, and revoking digital certificates for machine identities, providing the foundation for trusted communication and secure automation across all non human identities.

1. Manual Processes Are Expensive

Provisioning certificates manually can take hours per device, especially when dealing with legacy OT systems or vendor-specific hardware. This manual certificate management is not only time-consuming but also introduces significant challenges and risks, such as increased potential for human error, which can lead to security vulnerabilities and regulatory non-compliance.

For large fleets, labour costs escalate quickly, and the manual effort required increases the likelihood of mistakes and operational inefficiencies.

2. Configuration Errors Create Outages

Certificate mismanagement, often resulting from human error in manual processes, is a leading cause of downtime in critical systems — affecting factories, hospitals and connected vehicle platforms.

3. Compliance Efforts Multiply

Regulators now require continuous monitoring of machine identities, and organizations must meet various regulatory requirements such as PCI-DSS, GDPR, and NIST. Manual reporting consumes time and increases the risk of audit failures, especially without maintaining audit trails to demonstrate regulatory compliance. To avoid penalties and reputational damage, organizations need to ensure compliance with industry standards.

4. Security Risks Translate into Real Financial Losses

Unmanaged or expired certificates can open the door to breaches, ransomware, or operational compromise, with the added risk of legal costs and regulatory penalties resulting from security breaches.

Such incidents can cause significant operational disruptions and require costly incident response efforts to restore normal operations and minimize damage.

5. Supplier-Led Identity Increases Dependency Costs

When suppliers control identity issuance, OEMs and operators incur long-term contractual and operational costs — as well as additional risk, especially when facing the challenges of integrating identity management with existing infrastructure and network infrastructure.

These costs often remain invisible until organisations quantify them — which is where automated identity lifecycle management provides clarity and efficiency.

Common Threats in Machine Identity Management

As organizations accelerate digital transformation and deploy more connected devices, machine identity management has become a cornerstone of modern security strategies. With machine identities now vastly outnumbering human users, the attack surface has expanded, introducing new risks that can undermine an organization’s security posture if not properly managed.

Some of the most common threats in machine identity management include:

• Unauthorized Access: Weak or improperly managed machine identities can allow bad actors to gain unauthorized access to critical systems, bypassing traditional access control measures designed for human users.
• Credential Theft: Machine credentials, such as private keys and digital certificates, are prime targets for cybercriminals. If these credentials are stolen, attackers can impersonate trusted devices, move laterally within the network, and access sensitive data.
• Man-in-the-Middle Attacks: Without robust machine identity protection, attackers can intercept communications between devices, injecting malicious commands or exfiltrating data by exploiting gaps in identity management.
• Data Exfiltration: Compromised machine identities can be used to siphon off sensitive information from IoT devices, operational technology, or cloud environments, leading to data breaches and compliance failures.
• Lateral Movement: Once inside the network, attackers can use compromised machine identities to move undetected between systems, escalating privileges and targeting additional assets.

These threats highlight the importance of continuous monitoring, automated credential management, and strong identity management practices. By proactively addressing these risks, organizations can strengthen their security posture, protect both machine and human users, and ensure business continuity in an increasingly connected world.

The Economic Value of Automation in 2025

Machine identity automation transforms identity management from a labour-intensive process into a streamlined, scalable workflow. Automation drives operational efficiency by reducing manual effort, saving time, and improving productivity for IT and security teams. It also enables predictive maintenance through proactive monitoring and data analysis, helping organizations extend asset lifespans and reduce downtime. It enables organisations to replace reactive, manual work with proactive, policy-driven automation, highlighting the value of investing in preventive measures to reduce the risk and cost of security incidents.

The financial benefits fall into four core categories:

1. Operational Savings: Reducing Manual Workload and Workforce Pressure

Security teams are overstretched, especially as the number of devices grows exponentially—a challenge that many organizations face as their IoT deployments scale. Automated machine identity:

• Eliminates repetitive certificate handling
• Cuts manual onboarding time from hours to minutes
• Reduces reliance on scarce PKI expertise
• Prevents certificate-related service outages
• Standardises processes across suppliers and internal teams
• Reduces manual effort and improves operational efficiency through automation

For organisations managing tens of thousands of devices, the labour savings alone justify the investment.

2. Cyber Risk Reduction: Preventing Breaches and Downtime

Unmanaged machine identities are now directly tied to cyber incidents. Studies from Device Authority emphasise that one-third of breaches involve IoT devices and more than 50% of devices carry critical vulnerabilities. The growing landscape of cyber threats—including emerging threats and evolving threats—continues to target IoT and OT environments, increasing the urgency for organizations to address these risks proactively.

Automation reduces risk by:

• Ensuring credentials never expire
• Rotating keys automatically
• Detecting anomalous device behaviour
• Enforcing Zero Trust policies continuously
• Preventing spoofing and impersonation attacks
• Securing OTA and cloud connections
• Enabling automated threat detection and implementing robust security measures to address potential threats

Every avoided breach, outage or safety incident has measurable financial value — often in the millions.

3. Compliance Efficiency: Meeting NIST, CRA and EO 14028 Requirements

Regulatory frameworks increasingly require:

• Continuous device monitoring
• Cryptographic identity enforcement
• Audit-ready lifecycle documentation
• Proven remediation
• Secure update pathways

Adhering to industry regulations such as NIST, ISO/IEC 27001, and IEC 62443 is essential to avoid non compliance with regulatory requirements, which can result in fines, penalties, and reputational damage.

Manual compliance reporting can consume thousands of hours annually. Automated machine identity provides:

• Real-time compliance evidence
• Automated audit logs
• Policy enforcement tied to standards
• Continuous verification

Organisations reduce the cost of audit preparation, avoid fines and demonstrate compliance with confidence.

4. Scalability: Supporting Long-Term Growth Without Growing the Team

As devices multiply, machine identity workloads can grow 10x or 100x. Automation scales instantly:

• Supporting millions of identities
• Eliminating repetitive onboarding tasks
• Integrating with suppliers and cloud platforms
• Managing certificates across global operations
• Supporting cloud computing environments and integrating with existing infrastructure to manage machine identities across diverse IoT systems and IoT solutions

Organisations avoid hiring extensively or outsourcing costly identity services.

How KeyScaler Drives High-Impact ROI

KeyScaler 2025 provides a centralised, automated platform that addresses all aspects of machine identity lifecycle management. Its features — including agentless onboarding, automated certificate rotation, AI-driven risk scoring and secure update enforcement — directly contribute to ROI. The platform enhances machine identity security and supports the management of digital identities across enterprise digital ecosystems, ensuring robust authentication and access control for both human and machine entities. KeyScaler integrates multi factor authentication and advanced security measures to proactively safeguard IoT and OT systems, reduce risks, and ensure compliance in complex digital environments.

Key areas where KeyScaler delivers measurable gains include:

Automated device provisioning

Cuts onboarding time and removes manual key distribution errors. Secure automated provisioning is especially critical for IoT sensors in industries like manufacturing, healthcare, automotive, and energy, where these sensors play a vital role in connected systems and require robust security and compliance.

Credential and certificate lifecycle automation

Eliminates outages caused by expired or misconfigured certificates by automating certificate lifecycle management, which reduces errors and enhances security.

Centralised policy enforcement

Reduces the cost of compliance through continuous enforcement and by maintaining detailed audit trails to support compliance and audit readiness.

AI-supported anomaly detection

Prevents incidents before they escalate, reducing cyber risk by enabling AI-driven anomaly detection that supports rapid incident response and minimizes downtime.

Supplier and manufacturing integration

Simplifies identity provisioning across complex network infrastructure in the supply chain.

By reducing manual work, operational friction and cybersecurity exposure, KeyScaler turns identity management from a cost burden into an efficiency driver.

How to Calculate ROI Using Device Authority’s ROI Calculator

Device Authority’s ROI Calculator allows organisations to quantify:

• The current cost of manual identity management
• The labour hours spent per device over its lifecycle
• The cost of certificate-related outages
• The number and risk profile of unmanaged devices
• Compliance overheads
• Efficiency gains from automation
• The financial and operational impact of incidents as captured in a data breach report

By inputting information about the device estate, team size, processes and regulatory environment, users receive a tailored ROI assessment that highlights:

• Annual operational savings
• Risk reduction value
• Compliance cost savings
• 3-year and 5-year financial impact
• Strategic benefits via automation

This enables CISOs, architects and finance leaders to make data-backed decisions on identity-first security strategies.

The Financial Impact: What the Numbers Typically Show

Based on industry benchmarks and customer data, organisations typically discover:

• Manual identity management consumes 25–40% more resources than expected.
• Automated certificate management reduces outages by 80–95%.
• Continuous Zero Trust decreases remediation costs by 60% or more.
• Lifecycle automation can reduce compliance labour by 50%+.
• Identity automation scales to support millions of devices without workforce expansion.

In many cases, automation pays for itself within the first year — especially in IoT-heavy industries like automotive, healthcare and manufacturing. Beyond cost savings, automation and machine identity management serve as a business enabler, supporting digital transformation and providing a competitive advantage by allowing organizations to innovate and adapt rapidly.

Strategic Benefits That Don’t Fit Easily Into Spreadsheets

While ROI calculators capture financial metrics, organisations also gain intangible but strategic benefits: Effective identity and access management requires not only securing human identities, but also managing non human identities and service accounts. By ensuring comprehensive governance across all identity types, organisations strengthen security, maintain compliance, and reduce operational risk.

1. Stronger customer and regulator trust

Identity automation allows organisations to demonstrate accountability and transparency.

2. Improved supplier governance

OEM-owned identity frameworks reduce fragmentation and misalignment in the supply chain.

3. Faster deployment of new devices and services

Teams can onboard devices faster and roll out new technologies without delay.

4. Reduced operational complexity

Identity becomes predictable, repeatable and enforceable.

These benefits translate into competitive advantage — especially as connected systems become a core differentiator for modern organisations.

Conclusion: Machine Identity Automation Isn’t Just a Security Win – It’s a Financial One

In 2025, device ecosystems have grown beyond the capacity of manual processes and traditional PKI. Machine identity automation is no longer a specialist feature – it is a foundational requirement for any organisation scaling IoT or OT systems.

Automated identity lifecycle management:

• Reduces operational cost
• Minimises downtime
• Strengthens compliance
• Reduces cybersecurity exposure
• Enables scalable Zero Trust adoption
• Provides predictable, measurable ROI

Device Authority’s KeyScaler platform and ROI Calculator give organisations a clear roadmap for understanding and capturing these benefits.

Identity is no longer just a technical question, it is a business decision with direct financial impact. Those who automate now will outpace competitors in security, efficiency and cost control.