Machine identities are exploding, especially across new Industry 4.0 and IoT environments that support digital transformation. Venafi is committed to enabling our customers to protect their business-critical applications throughout their digital transformation. To support this effort, we created the Machine Identity Management Development Fund. With $12.5 Million, the Fund sponsors the development of integrations with the Venafi Platform over the coming years, accelerating the expansion of the Venafi ecosystem.
In just six months since the Development Fund’s inception, eleven companies are building integrations with the Venafi platform. Many of the funded developers were present at the 2019 Venafi Global Customer Summit in Orlando, and I had the pleasure of getting to know them and learning about the exciting plans they have for the Venafi Platform.
In this interview, I speak with Young-Hwan Kim who is a COO at accessec in Germany.
What does accessec do?
Young-Hwan: accessec is an IT-Security Consulting Company that provides professional recommendations to industrial businesses in Germany to achieve a secure strategy for digital transformation. Industry 4.0 and IoT are currently among the most important topics for the further development and optimization of industrial value creation networks.
As part of the Development Fund, what’s the machine identity management challenge you are seeking to solve?
Young-Hwan: The trend in Industry 4.0 and IoT encourages the networking of machinery and devices, which make machine identity attack surfaces grow even more. Businesses of all size in manufacturing are facing increasing threats to their cyber-physical systems. Once smart devices and smart machines become “self-organizing” and need trustworthy and proven identities to authenticate with, safeguarding the identity of these devices and machines becomes even more relevant.
How does accessec propose to solve this challenge?
Young-Hwan: Today, due to missing software and common interfaces across Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), machines do not have a universal standard to protect their identities. The Machine Identity Managment application for PLCs, which we are building as part of the Development Fund, will provide powerful embedded security functions that enable fully functional Machine Identity Management through the Venafi Platform.
Describe the new world for customers when they can protect Machine Identities on PLCs.
Young-Hwan: As part of the Venafi Development Fund, we will deliver an application for Venafi customers to embed Certificate Lifecycle Management into their PLCs. This will equip their machine networks with powerful, secure identities based on industrial standards. With that, organizations will have full control on their machine identities and enhanced security with the additional benefit of simplified identity and access controls.
The accessec-built Venafi application for PLCs is targeted to be complete by the end of 2019. Visit accessec on the Venafi Marketplace for more information and to download their Adaptable Driver. And stay tuned for future interviews with Machine Identity Management Development Fund recipients.
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