Venafi release aids security teams with machine identity management

Venafi, the machine identity management expert, has introduced Firefly, the only lightweight machine identity issuer that supports highly distributed, cloud native environments.

Part of the Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities, Firefly is designed to enable security teams to securely meet developer-driven machine identity management requirements for cloud native workloads by issuing machine identities, such as TLS and SPIFFE, locally at high speeds across any environment.

By delivering added speed, reliability and security for machine identities in modern architectures, it helps organisations ensure enterprise trust for issued certificates and adhere to corporate security policies, while accelerating application development and digital transformation.

Shivajee Samdarshi, Chief Product Officer at Venafi, says, "With an increasing number of organisations moving to modern, cloud native architectures that are highly distributed, there is a growing need for machine identities in modern applications to be delivered at scale with near-zero latency to address key challenges around authentication.

"Firefly addresses these critical challenges in a fast, easy and secure way. It reduces security risks while also eliminating inefficiencies that often slow development teams down and future-proofing organizations against the challenges of tomorrow."

Firefly is delivered as an easy-to-deploy container that can run in any cloud native environment, providing a fast, easy and secure way to issue machine identities. Machine identity policy is configured in the Venafi Control Plane and inherited by Firefly instances.

Together, Venafi Control Plane and Firefly provide a lightweight, distributed architecture that make Firefly the only machine identity issuer for modern use cases requiring local high-speed autonomous issuance, low-latency cloud native use cases and advanced CI/CD with identity provider embedded in the pipeline, the company states.

Key capabilities include:

• Observability: Through the Venafi Control Plane, Firefly delivers visibility into distributed issuance activity. This extends Control Plane observability of machine identities from the data centre to the cloud and the edge.
• Consistency: Firefly gives security teams control over policy for machine identities issued to modern applications in cloud native environments and ensures developers use a secure and consistent issuer.
• Reliability: Firefly requires minimal infrastructure to deploy in production to achieve high availability and fault tolerance.
• Freedom of Choice: Firefly has multiple deployment options, including cloud native, DevOps, cloud and federated PKI environments, giving developers flexibility to use Firefly wherever and whenever it's needed.

Firefly is focused on reducing complexity and increasing the speed of development, while at the same time increasing security for machine identities needed for modern cloud native applications.