Machine identity management in the cloud can be significantly more complicated than it is on-premises. Putting aside the sheer number of machines that need to be protected, every machine must interact with hundreds, if not thousands, of other containers, services, machines and platforms, many of which may belong to third parties—and all of these machines have wildly varying lifespans and integration methods. These virtual and cloud machines can dial up and down at virtually a moment’s notice.
Despite the added complexities involved, introducing a machine identity management platform will bring a number of benefits to your enterprise, including but not limited to self-service management, cloud cost management, and automated management policies.
Many of the largest, most security-conscious organizations have successfully migrated their IT infrastructures to AWS, Azure and GCP—while ensuring a foundation of trust for their machine identities. These customers recognized from the get-go that in order to use the cloud to deliver business objectives, they needed to have an effective machine identity management strategy in place. How do they do it?
Learn all about how a large manufacturing company successfully utilized Azure to safely and successfully integrate the IT infrastructure of all newly acquired companies into their exiting “parent” assets.
Tale of 3 Clouds eBook: How Venafi Creates Digital Transformation
Since its inception, this large manufacturing company has grown into a Fortune 500 behemoth through its targeted acquisitions of smaller companies. But this strategy—
once a common means of growth for many companies— has become a more onerous undertaking as digital transformation accelerates. After all, when you acquire a smaller company, you’re acquiring its unique IT infrastructure.
This infrastructure must be absorbed and integrated into the main company’s environment without putting either company at risk. This can be a potential nightmare so significant that it may even completely negate other business values.
So, this company decided to migrate all acquired companies’ IT into Azure, where it would then be aligned with the parent company’s environment. To make this initiative work, the parent company needed assurance that the destination Azure installation was secured and properly managed. The goal of this approach was to ensure that all assets coming from an acquired company would integrate into the parent company’s assets and work safely.
To make this approach work, the manufacturing company knew they needed the ability to proactively and securely manage all machine identities—regardless of whether they were defined through TLS certificates, SSH keys or code signing keys. This strategy would assure a foundational level of safety and trust across the entire Azure environment, no matter where the infrastructure originated. Fortunately, the company had used Venafi for years to manage machine identities in their on-premises environment, and they knew we could help the company do the same in Azure.
Venafi has built hundreds of integrations, for both hardware- and software-defined load balancers, APIs, agents and more— so that workloads and services migrating into Azure can be trusted. And Venafi was able to accomplish this in such an intuitive way that the company’s CISO joked: “With Venafi, it’s just plug-and-play!”
Want to learn more? Check out our eBook “Tale of 3 Clouds” to learn how other enterprises leveraged Venafi to manage their machine identities in each of the top three public clouds: Azure and GCP.
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