Enterprises today rely on complex networks of physical and virtual machines—on premises and across private and public clouds—to support development and operation of an ever-growing list of applications and services. As connected machines (including virtual machines) grow in number and complexity, it is increasingly important to automate the orchestration and maintenance of each and every machine identity. Manually securing all these devices is not only incredibly inefficient, it also opens you up to disruptions caused by administrative bottlenecks and human error. Fortunately, Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) and Venafi offer a better solution that expertly automates the life cycle of machine identities, removing the threat of certificate-related outages.
As automation is the heart of machine identity management, it seemed fitting to recognize a key member of the Venafi ecosystem for their commitment to innovation and our customers’ success. Congratulations to Citrix for being awarded the 2021 Automation Innovator award! I had the pleasure of interviewing Asit Mohapatra, Citrix ADM Product Manager, on this achievement.
CIO Study: Automation Vital to Address Shorter Lifespans and Massive Growth of TLS/SSL Certificates
Congratulations to you and Citrix on bringing new levels of automation for machine identities. What are your thoughts on Citrix being recognized for automation innovation?
Asit: Thank you to Venafi for this recognition. Let me talk a bit about our vision. As an application delivery and security solution, our vision is to provide a flawless application experience and maintain a consistent security posture for all applications across hybrid multi-cloud environment. And with this integration with Venafi we have been able to automate the management of the complete machine identity life cycle, which is bringing immense value to our admins. There are a couple of things which stood out clearly. The Venafi Trust Protection Platform offers an out-of-the-box integration with all the most preferred certificate authorities, and the APIs were very simple to use so we could just plug in the whole solution into our overall application delivery management product with ease. We plan to take this integrated solution to a lot of customers.
Gartner has listed Machine Identity Management as a high priority, why do you think it has become so important?
Asit: The enterprise security landscape has become complex as apps are being delivered from hybrid multi cloud and as the workforce becomes more distributed. Suddenly there is a proliferation of servers, virtual machines, IOT, smartphones and other devices, which makes the number of machine identities managed balloon with time. Thus, there is a need for tracking the life cycle of the supporting machine identities—like SSL certificates—in an easy, seamless manner with the power of automation.
With SSL certificates deployed on multiple Citrix ADC devices, tracking these certificates life cycle has become cumbersome. Our customers’ latent need is to protect machine identities like SSL certificates with monitoring and automation of the life cycle. That’s what really drove us to develop a first-class machine identity management integration.
Why did you choose Venafi to integrate with?
Asit: An integration with Venafi offered Citrix and our customers multiple advantages, such as:
- An out-of-the-box integration with many enterprise-grade Certificate Authorities
- Support for zero-touch automation
- Easy-to-use APIs to build the integration
Global 5000 companies spread across multiple industries use Venafi for securing their machine identities like digital certificates. The Venafi Ecosystem integrates not only with multiple Certificate Authorities but also with other monitoring solutions, like Slack, Datadog, Splunk and Tableau, which many of our customers use in their enterprises. That makes Venafi a more natural choice for end-to-end integration.
Describe the integration. What are the key benefits and features?
Asit: With this integration, customers can easily configure their Venafi servers on ADM service. Customers get visibility into expired certificates on the ADM App dashboard and can create a certificate-signing request (CSR), trigger a new certificate request to ADM service and install the certificate on the ADC as well. The best part is that all of the above steps can be automated with just a few settings.
The integration gives the application owners complete control of their SSL certificate life cycle, without being dependent on other teams like Network teams, PKI teams or others. This reduces the overall turnaround time, effort and TCO of certificate management.
What do you envision for the future of the Citrix and Venafi partnership?
Asit: We want more and more customers to leverage this integration to automate their SSL certificate life cycle. With both Citrix and Venafi catering to many Fortune 500 organizations, we believe this integration would become a preferred choice of SSL certificate management for our customers. We are also rolling out a three-week canned environment for customers who do not have Venafi licenses but still want to try out the integrated solution. Customers can sign in to ADM service on the express tier and request a free demo environment for Venafi server.
You can learn more about the Venafi and Citrix ADM integration and get started today with Citrix ADM service on Citrix Cloud.
This blog features a solution from the ever-growing Venafi Ecosystem, where industry leaders are building and collaborating to protect more machine identities across organizations like yours. Learn more about how the Venafi Technology Network is evolving above and beyond just technical integrations.
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