The study conducted by Venafi found that in the last six months 36 per cent of financial organisations experienced an outage that impacted critical business applications or services.
In addition financial services chief information officers were more concerned about the impact of certificate-related outages on customers.
The biggest fear comes from the damage to reputation due to an outage while 34 per cent are concerned about the increasing interdependencies between technology and services which would make future outages more painful.
The study surveyed over 100 chief information officers in the US, the UK, France, Germany and Australia to find the results and nearly all officers agreed that certificate usage would grow by at least 25 per cent over the next five years.
This year organisations will spend close to US$10 billion to protect and manage passwords but will spend almost nothing to protect machines digital certificates.
These certificates serve as machine identities in order to communicate securely with other machines and gain authorised access to applications and services.
The average outage in a Global 5000 organisation can cost US$5,600 a minute while larger networks with a more severe outage can cost US$500,000 per hour.
Vice-president of security strategy and threat intelligence for Venafi Kevin Bocek said organisations from every sector struggle with these outages but the issues were more pronounced in financial ones.
“The entire sector is focused on trust, performance and reliability, so they can’t afford service interruptions. At the same time, the industry has been transformed by open banking initiatives,” he said.
As a result, organisations rely more heavily on machine identities said Mr Bocek but often without the right security in place.
“Unfortunately, these critical security assets are often unmanaged and unprotected, even though they protect mobile applications, containerisation initiatives and cloud architectures.”
