Last week we announced the “Escape Gravity Challenge” for innovators in the Machine Identity Management Development Fund. But we’d like to take that challenge even further. We’ve now added two new innovators to the roster of thought leaders in the Machine Identity Management Fund. And to raise the stakes on the Escape Gravity Challenge, we’ll be including the new innovators in the competition!
These two new innovators are joining a prestigious list of technology visionaries who are creating cutting-edge integrations that are designed to help organizations futureproof their machine identity management. To date, Venafi has funded over 50 innovations that allow Venafi customers to automate lifecycle, authenticate, authorize, and govern machine identities across their environments. This represents the type of commitment to machine identity innovation that can only come from a global leader like Venafi.
As Kevin Bocek, Venafi VP of Ecosystem and Community has previously shared, “Venafi integrates with innovators from around the world. You could try to go it alone without an ecosystem, but you won't be winning any races. We accelerate the future of machine identity management. The need for innovation and integration will only increase from one line of code to the latest cloud native technologies.”
Now, without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to the two latest innovators who join the ranks of thought leaders in the Machine Identity Management Development Fund. The newest developers to receive sponsorship from the Development Fund include:
Otterize
Otterize is dedicated to tackling one of the most daunting challenges developers encounter in the cloud landscape: securely granting access to services. Currently, platform teams are burdened with teaching developers, handling manual secure connection setups, or even compromising security due to a lack of viable alternatives. Otterize steps in with a transformative approach—automating service access control to create an entirely new paradigm for service-to-service and infrastructure communication. Otterize helps to make secure access transparent for developers with intent-based access control, a declarative approach to service-to-service authorization. In doing this, Otterize eliminates the need for developers to make machine identity management decisions.
Newest innovation for Venafi customers: Otterize will integrate cert-manager to enable the use of TLS and mTLS machines identities that meet security team policies including issuer and issuing policy. Otterize's opensource credentials-operator is getting an upgrade to seamlessly support cert-manager. The credentials operator handles two crucial aspects of authentication: providing workload identity and dynamically generating machine identities (mTLS certificates) during runtime using cert-manager. At that point, the intents operator, being aware of the mTLS credentials, then provisions the correct access controls—like ACLs for Kafka. Otterize will be integrated with TLS Protect Cloud as an issuer along with TLS Protect for Kubernetes to provide observability and policy.
Entro
Entro solves the problem of unknown secret managers and unknown machine identities through deep discovery inside of vaults. To accomplish this, Entro reveals secrets everywhere across code, messaging channels, wikis, Vaults, CI/CD, cloud assets, and more, and provides vital in-depth visibility such as the secret owner, correlated service, permissions, and severity level. Entro constantly monitors secrets for abnormal behavior, detects and helps remediate risks, and ensures secrets are protected with security oversight across multiple channels and vaults. Entro supports secrets managers including HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, Google Secret Manager, Kubernetes, and GitHub.
Newest innovation for Venafi customers: Entro Security will be able to detect if a certificate was created outside of Venafi TLS Protect Datacenter and TLS Protect Cloud. If TLS certificates are found in a secret manager and not in the Venafi Control Plane, they should be synchronized with Venafi to meet the TLS-configured policies. Furthermore, this will raise an alert in Entro for security teams that TLS certificates are being used outside of Venafi Control Plane for investigation.
Put futureproofing to the test
Come join us in this free-spirited competition to test and prove the value that Machine Identity Management Development Fund innovators are providing for the world’s most security savvy organizations. We have now included our two newest Machine Identity Development Fund innovators to keep it interesting. Hope to see you soon at the Machine Identity Management Summit 2023, September 18-19 in Las Vegas.