Venafi launches Control Plane for Machine Identities

Venafi, the inventor and provider of machine identity management, has unveiled the Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities.

The Venafi Control Plane unifies machine identity management across all identity types; in data centres, cloud, hybrid environments and at the edge. It is designed to enable customers to accelerate digital transformation, increase development speed, reduce security risk and eliminate business disruptions.

Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi, says, "Venafi partners with the largest, most complex organisations in the world, and our solutions secure the vast majority of the digital infrastructure that runs our modern world. These partnerships have given us a deep understanding of the complexity created by digital transformation and the shift to hybrid and cloud native architectures.

"Today, a typical global organisation has hundreds of thousands of machines which include applications, APIs, containers and microservices, in addition to physical devices - spread across a wide variety of environments. Each one of these machines requires an identity.

"At Venafi, we know how costly and slow it is to build identity-based, zero trust architectures in these complicated, rapidly changing environments. The Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities is unmatched in reducing complexity and increasing the speed of development, while at the same time increasing security for machine identities which are the foundation of trust in our modern world."

There are two actors on every network: people and machines. People rely on usernames, passwords and two-factor authentication to gain access to data and services. Machines also need identities for the same reasons.

According to Venafi, rapid adoption of cloud infrastructures requires a greater number and variety of machine identities, many of which change rapidly because they are ephemeral. For example, some cloud native environments require huge volumes of certificates (one of many different types of machine identities) with near zero latency.

Organisations spend millions of dollars managing human identities but are just realising the criticality of security and protecting machine identities. The Venafi Control Plane is a control plane for machine identity management designed to deliver observability, consistency, reliability and freedom of choice across clouds, hybrid environments, data centres and the edge.

The Venafi Control Plane delivers core capabilities directly and distributes or delegates them within reusable patterns and policy controls.

Together these capabilities support cradle-to-grave machine identity lifecycle orchestration, authentication, authorisation and governance providing customers with immediate value, including:

• Elimination of outages on customer-facing infrastructure, which saves an average $9.3 million of revenue per hour for financial services firms
• Dramatic reduction in the risk of data breaches that cost, on average, US$5.97 million per breach
• Improvement of machine identity management efficiency, increasing productivity by as much as 98%

To ensure these capabilities are available in even the most demanding edge and cloud native environments, Venafi is also announcing early access to a new Venafi Control Plane service: Fast Issuance.

Fast Issuance is an ultra low-latency service for issuing machine identities at speed with zero dependencies. The Fast Issuance service enables local issuance for entities or services that require machine identities to be delivered at scale with near-to-zero latency. Fast Issuance can be used in any environment: cloud native, data centre, hybrid or edge.

Venafi has also published the Modern Machine Identity Management Reference Architecture. The Reference Architecture incorporates zero trust best practices for architecting machine identity management in data centre, cloud and edge architectures. The reference architecture is based on extensive experience partnering with global organisations designing complex hybrid and cloud native production environments.

Kevin Bocek, Vice President of Threat Intelligence and Security Strategy at Venafi, says, "As companies come to grips with the increasing number of workloads they are running in the cloud, they realise that inefficiencies are slowing down teams and creating new security risks that are just waiting to be exploited.

"Success in the cloud is now a function of design and architecture, especially when board members want specific information about zero trust strategies. Without the right architecture, the headaches, costs and incidents connected with the cloud are sure to grow.

"The Control Plane for Machine Identity Management is the first and only solution that gives platform and security teams the power to collaborate on repeatable design patterns and blueprints. From cloud native to mainframe, the Venafi Control Plane provides measurable consistency, observability and reliability.

"This new approach makes it possible for developers to build using the tools, clouds and languages they love, while security and platform teams have confidence and frictionless operations."