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You've heard us talk a lot about increasing complexity in machine identity security but let me cement that with some solid statistics. Last year, Venafi customers around the globe completed:
- 36 million certificate authority connections
- 166 million code signing operations
- 21 billion API calls to the Venafi Control Plane
Those are mind-boggling numbers are hard for anyone to wrap their head around, but managing and securing machine identities has never been more important.
Machine identities—like TLS certificates, SSH keys, code signing credentials and more—all need to be carefully managed and secured. They provide the very foundation of security, enabling authentication and authorization of all machines and their connections with one another across an enterprise. However, if these machine identities aren’t properly secured, organizations may be left susceptible to outages and breaches.
But given the current scope and scale, taking charge of machine identities has never been harder.
At least, that was, until generative AI entered the picture.
The Generative AI Identity Crisis: Emerging AI Threatscapes and Mitigations
Industry perspectives on generative AI in machine identity security
Generative AI presents numerous applications for simplifying and optimizing machine identity security, yet most companies are only talking about this untapped potential. They’ve yet to actually harness its power for any practical use cases that could simplify the lives of those responsible for managing machine identities.
Sure, they're mentioning how AI can help you automatically discover certificates, provide specific analytics around usage and patterns, and spin up visuals related to certificate usage, to help quickly relay the value of a machine identity security program.
But for most of the industry, that’s where it stops. With talk.
Not at Venafi.
We’ve been implementing AI into our offerings, simplifying customer lives through the power of generative AI, for nearly a year now—ever since we introduced Venafi Athena at Machine Identity Security Summit 2023.
A refresher on Venafi Athena
As the category creator and market leader in machine identity security, Venafi understands the challenges of machine identity complexity like no one else. We’ve seen firsthand how much work the world’s largest, most security-conscious companies have to handle—with and unpredictable number of CA connections being used, millions of connected applications and millions more APIs.
Does that sound like what your team is facing? We get it.
Countless new business technologies and use cases have emerged, and to maintain a competitive advantage, companies need a way to safely navigate today’s cloud-first, generative AI, post-quantum world.
To meet this newfangled complexity head on, without becoming bogged down by the day to day, you need a fast, intelligent, and integrated AI solution, baked right into the machine identity security tools and workflows you use daily.
That's why Venafi created Venafi Athena, the industry's first generative-AI-powered machine identity management and security technology. Just like the Greek goddess of wisdom who leapt from Zeus' head fully formed and primed for battle, Venafi Athena is trained on and equipped with decades of expertise, providing everything from practical advice to optimization tips and integration code, all in the blink of an eye.
This powerful technology operates across the Venafi Control Plane and its integrated ecosystem—and features three core AI/ML capabilities to simplify the lives of security teams, developers and the larger machine identity security community.
Venafi Athena for Security Teams
As the volume of machine identities explodes, you need to be able to make rapid, intelligent and informed management and security decisions.
Venafi Athena can help you identify trends and provide suggestions through a straightforward chat interface, helping you more easily and more intuitively get started, identify improvements and perform complex tasks.
Example applications
On the Venafi Control Plane documentation website, you can click the Venafi Athena icon in the bottom right corner and ask her any question you'd like around using Venafi or configuring an integration.
For instance, maybe you want to learn how to discover certificates with Venafi:
Or maybe you'd like to learn how to set up an F5 BIG-IP LTM:
Machine identity security can't really be that easy, can it?
It really is that easy.
Instead of shuffling through pages of documentation, you can go straight to a source that's already trained on best-in-breed data from a real, integrated SaaS platform, decades of machine identity security expertise and proven best practices.
Information that only Venafi makes possible. No one has the depth and breadth of expertise and insights that we do, because no one else has a truly integrated SaaS platform like the Venafi Control Plane, and this real-world data underpins everything Venafi Athena is able to do.
Because generative AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. And you won't find another industry AI solution as capable as this one.
But at Venafi, we aren't in the habit of resting on our laurels, and we continuously dedicate ourselves to ongoing innovation.
Which means we didn't stop here.
Venafi Athena for the Community
Ever needed to see which of your organization's certificates are expiring this month, without having to shuffle through dashboards? Or maybe you've needed a visualization of certificates that were issued in a month?
Venafi's open-source, experimental laboratory on Hugging Face allows you to do all that and more. With our Vikram Explorer project, we've combined the power of our TLS Protect API with OpenAI's ChatGPT, to provide real-time, on-the-fly answers and insights.
This is where the rubber really meets the road. This is where we're not just simplifying your workload; we're revolutionizing how the world manages and secures machine identities.
To find out how to use this experimental project, head over here.
Example applications
After you've provided your TLS Protect Cloud API key, the Vikram project will pre-fetch data from your environment, which you can then analyze and interact with in an entirely local instance.
Once you've logged in with your API key, you can start asking questions immediately, again with simple, natural language.
In the background, as this request is processed, the project is automatically generating code and running data analysis, and in less than 15 seconds provides the list of soon-to-be-expiring certificates in this environment.
Asking questions and getting real-time insights is one thing. But what if you need a quick visualization of a machine identity-related question, like, “Plot a bar graph for 9 months of certificates issued with X axis name of month.”
Instead of tracking down all the correct data, generating a report and turning that into a graph—which could take hours or days, depending on how much data you must sift through—the Vikram Explorer project does it for you in seconds.
And when you're done, you can download that graph right from the Hugging Face lab.
It's as simple as typing a one-line prompt!
This is how you get real results from AI, by using real data in real time, to get quick, easy-to-understand insights.
And the best part? It’s available for Venafi customers today.
Venafi Athena for Developers
So far, we've talked about how Venafi Athena helps save time by reading documentation and answering questions. We've discussed how our Hugging Face lab lets you use near-natural language to convert complex datasets, straight from TLS Protect Cloud, into simple visualizations.
But Venafi Athena still has one more capability—that's not yet available today—but will be soon. That's Venafi Athena for developers, which automatically generates code recipes.
You can see a first-hand concept demo of this at 46:25 in our announcement keynote from Machine Identity Management Summit 2023.
Harness the power of AI to slay machine identity complexity in seconds
Meet the industry's new machine identity security patron today.
Across Ancient Greece, Athena helped countless heroes defeat legions of monsters and overcome impossible odds. Today, she’s here to help you do the same with machine identity complexity. Which itself can be, at times, a many-headed Hydra.
To learn more, I invite you to try out the available capabilities. You'll quickly see how easy machine identity security can be.
We promise it's not just talk. Nor is it divine intervention (though it may feel like it). It’s Venafi Athena.