The concept of a control plane is now common as a way to maintain control over network and workload configurations in modern environments to ensure more effective management, oversight and consistency. This concept has been successfully applied to the control of the machine identities to secure machine-to-machine connections and communications. And now top analysts are beginning to write about a control plane for machine identity.
The 2024 Gartner® Reference Architecture Brief: API Access Control, released in March, outlines “Heterogeneity, security and user expectations require a modular API access control architecture. Security and risk management technical professionals protecting APIs must decouple authorization, federate to support all user constituencies and establish machine identity practices tailored for APIs.” The reference architecture notes, “The establishment of machine identity practices using runtime provided workload identities and deeper certificate and secrets management is now also required to enable centralized governance of credentials and encryption.”
Venafi has long been a champion of the value of a Control Plane for Machine Identities. Based on feedback from our Global 5000 customers, we reconfigured our entire product line around a Control Plane for Machine Identities back in October of 2022. Driven by the need to reduce machine identity management complexity and accelerate modernization, the Venafi Control Plane equips organizations with the observability, consistency, reliability and flexibility they need to manage all types of machine identities across the enterprise. But even better, it helps ensure that no machine identities fall through the cracks to negatively impact the organization.
Take Control of Your Machine Identities With Automation and ELIMINATE Outages!
When it comes to API and cloud native security, in particular, there are many challenges we see drive the need for a Control Plane for Machine Identities. First of all, runtime security vulnerabilities are increasing. The Red Hat State of Kubernetes security report 2023 found that 49% of container and Kubernetes security incidents in the last 12 months occurred during the runtime phase. To further complicate matters, cloud security teams do not have full visibility and control over how workload identities are issued and authenticated. Yet traditional infosec teams are now tasked with securitizing Tier 1 applications in Kubernetes clusters. Plus, zero trust architectures require effective certificate lifecycle management (CLM) and compliance across all environments and infrastructures.
A control plane provides the observability, consistency and governance organizations need to secure API and cloud native machine identities. Here are some of the components that Venafi believes will help cloud security and InfoSec teams secure Kubernetes environments.
- Cloud security teams need a workload identity issuer Consistent workload authentication and governance is paramount to cloud native security. As a lightweight, rapid workload identity issuer, Venafi Firefly removes the complexity of governing workload authentication across many clouds, platforms and applications. Plus, Firefly simplifies secrets management as it is the only workload identity issuer that uses SPIFFE to implement secret-less authentication for workloads. In addition, operating Kubernetes across multiple clouds requires a single trusted system for workload identity issuance and control. And Firefly delivers unified workload identities.
- Certificate lifecycle management is foundational for traditional and modern environments Venafi TLS Protect delivers effective CLM with policy controls for any environment. This ensures not only foundational security capabilities, but the crypto agility needed to operate CLM consistently across any combination of on-premises or cloud based environment. And because compliance for regulatory industries is essential, the Venafi Control Plane also provides full visibility and control of the widely used cert-manager in Kubernetes, which is maintained by Venafi.
- Developer-friendly enterprise-scale trust root system Firefly provides governance to ensure that all workload authentication using approved PKI is consistent and compliant which reduces complexity and improves threat management, especially in high-scale cloud native environments. Venafi Zero Touch PKI is an easy way to ensure that an organization’s PKI is available and always up to date.
- Ingress protection is critical for effective threat prevention Venafi TLS Protect for Kubernetes tracks cert-manager usage to prevent shadow IT from opening unseen vulnerabilities, such as allowing untrusted rogue CAs in production clusters. Plus, Venafi has defined threat vectors that compromise default Istio CAs and replaces them with undetected MITM proxies.
We’re happy to see leading analysts talking about a control plane for machine identity. We have been working tirelessly at the forefront of this movement for almost 20 years now to ensure that we deliver the most advanced, future-forward certificate management solutions that will protect our customers now and well into the future. That commitment is just one of the reasons that we have built a reputation as the most modern, connected, and trusted machine identity management company on the planet.
Why Do You Need a Control Plane for Machine Identities?
Gartner, Reference Architecture Brief: API Access Control, By Analyst(s): By Erik Wahlstrom, Published 20 March 2024
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