This week, I attended my first Gartner IAM Summit in London as the new Chief Revenue Officer at AppViewX. I’ve spent much of my career in ITOps and cybersecurity — leading GTM teams across a wide range of technologies — but walking into this event, it was immediately clear to me: Identity is one of the most critical, high-impact spaces in enterprise security right now.
Over the course of two days, in sessions, side conversations, and meetings with our EMEA customers and partners, one message came through loud and clear: identity is everything. And not just human identity. Machine identities — devices, workloads, applications, containers, APIs, services, bots, and more — now represent the vast majority of entities inside an enterprise. According to Gartner’s Felix Gaehtgens in the keynote that kicked off the conference, machine identities now outnumber humans by more than 45 to 1. Said another way – that’s more than 3 times the number of humans who have ever lived. It’s a staggering shift, and most organizations are simply not ready.
The impact of this imbalance is real. Felix shared that up to 25% of organizations have experienced security incidents tied to poorly managed machine identities. It’s not hard to see why: most teams are still using spreadsheets, static secrets, and fragmented tools to manage these critical credentials. As a result, outages, access failures, vulnerabilities, and compliance risks are becoming common — even at large, sophisticated organizations.
This is exactly the problem AppViewX was built to solve. And after hearing session after session validate what our customers already know — that automated, policy-driven certificate lifecycle management (CLM) and modern PKI are foundational to digital trust — I came away more energized than ever to help our team tell that story.
Certificate Lifecycle Management with Visibility, Control and Insights – All in One Place
One of the standout sessions for me was led by Sarah Almond, who spoke about the looming impact of quantum computing on cryptography. Her message was simple but urgent: organizations must become crypto-agile — now. The post-quantum era may still feel theoretical, but it could be less than 5 years away. That’s closer to us now than being past the original Covid outbreak. I think every CISO would have appreciated a 5-year warning of that paradigm shift. Additionally, the threats targeting when quantum computers will break today’s encryption algorithms are already real today. Bad actors are harvesting encrypted data in anticipation of future decryption capabilities. The time to build cryptographic inventories, prepare migration paths, and automate certificate rotation and lifecycles is now.
At AppViewX, we’ve invested deeply in this space. Our AVX ONE platform delivers intelligent CLM and we’ve architected it with crypto-agility and post-quantum readiness in mind. We give organizations the ability to discover, automate, and control their entire machine identity footprint — whether that’s for compliance, modernization, or security resilience.
It was also fascinating to see how CLM is moving from a back-office conversation into the heart of strategic IAM and Zero Trust architecture. In his session on certificate management, Gartner’s Paul Rabinovich called out certificate outages as not just technical failures, but business continuity threats. He reinforced what many of our enterprise customers already feel: you can’t have a reliable IAM program without a solid foundation of certificate automation and visibility.
What makes all of this even more exciting — at least for me having a broader GTM leadership role — is that AppViewX is perfectly positioned to lead in this moment. We’re not trying to retrofit a legacy product into a modern identity framework. We’re already there. We have deep integrations, a growing partner ecosystem, and a strong record of success with some of the most complex enterprise environments in the world.
Beyond the analyst sessions, the highlight of the event for me was simply listening to our customers. I had dozens of conversations with IT and security leaders across EMEA, and every one of them reinforced the same truth: identity-first security depends on machine identity maturity. And most organizations are still in the early innings. That’s not a problem — it’s an opportunity.
Looking ahead, I’m especially excited about where we’re going as a company. Our roadmap is focused on the future: Machine Identity Management (MIM), Non-Human Identity (NHI), and a cloud-native, crypto-agile platform that can scale with the needs of tomorrow’s enterprises. It’s a big vision, but it’s grounded in real problems we’re solving every day.
To everyone who met with us at the London Gartner IAM event — thank you. It was an inspiring, energizing experience. To our team: the market is moving in our direction. The need is real. The urgency is growing. Let’s keep building — with purpose, with clarity, and with the mission to help our customers secure everything, with automation and agility.
I welcome you to learn more about AppViewX or even schedule a demo of how our solutions can get you crypto-agile to manage machine identities at scale, prepare for post-quantum cryptography and practice better overall crypto hygiene.
AppViewX can help you implement crypto-agility and start preparing today for Post-Quantum Cryptography
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About the Author
Stephen Tarleton
Chief Revenue Officer
Stephen Tarleton is the Chief Revenue Officer at AppViewX, where he leads global Sales, Marketing, and Channel operations. With a focus on accelerating go-to-market strategies and driving revenue growth, he is committed to strengthening AppViewX’s position as a global leader in Non-Human Identity security.
