There is definitive new guidance on certificate lifecycle management as a strong subset of machine identity management. According to the 2024 Gartner® Effectively Manage Your Organization’s Certificates report “Organizations routinely experience outages stemming from unmanaged certificates. Security and risk management technical professionals must implement effective certificate life cycle management to support discovery, automation and crypto-agility.”. Venafi was noted as an Example Vendor in the Gartner report, with additional mentions for cert-manager and advances in machine learning (ML) and generative AI (GenAI).
Venafi is always looking ahead for ways that we can help our Global 5000 customers future-proof their approach to machine identity management. We are committed to innovation in the certificate lifecycle management space and we are proud of our history of anticipating our customers’ needs to deliver future-forward solutions. Here are some of the core CLM capabilities where our innovations have proven particularly valuable to our most security conscious customers:
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Here are the core CLM capabilities that we believe Venafi has met and exceeded:
- Certificate orchestration and governance.
Last year, Venafi launched the Control Plane for Machine Identities. This machine identity, CA and environment agnostic management platform delivers observability, consistency, and control of all machine identities across an organization. This unique, all-encompassing platform allows organizations to implement governance across their entire population of machine identities to reduce risk of outage or compromise from the ground to the cloud. This design philosophy can be seen in how Venafi TLS Protect Cloud, Venafi TLS Protect for Kubernetes and Venafi Firefly make customers successful in modern hybrid and cloud-native architectures.
- Certificate discovery and inventory across environments.
Venafi offers a full suite of innovative cloud-based discovery capabilities that not only provides an instant inventory of public facing certificates, but also provides private discovery for internal certificates. Plus, we have world-class validation services to eliminate the risks of outage, misuse, or compromise. As a result, our customers can be confident that they have a complete inventory of all Certificate Authorities (CAs) that provide the machine identities that represent their organizations, as well as metadata such as each certificate’s ownership, location, expiration data and information about its users, function, and patterns of usage.
- Real-time updates on certificate status.
To supplement Venafi’s world-class reporting and alerting capabilities, which rapidly identify machine identity anomalies and vulnerabilities, we now provide Athena AI, which allows anyone to use natural language to get answers and graphical reports for specific, focused data requirements. Based on organization policy, these answer-back alerts and reports can inform admins of unauthorized changes or impending actions that need to be taken before outages happen or attackers take advantage of weak or unprotected machine identities. Venafi is also making the latest experimental features available on the center of AI university, Hugging Face.
- Automating validation and certificate lifecycle workflows.
Venafi provides drag-and-drop approval workflow capabilities in the systems that most leading organizations are already using through integrations with widely adopted partners, such as ServiceNow and n8n. We also enable modern approval workflow automation with our VCert playbooks.
- Protecting the certificate lifecycle across the enterprise.
Venafi’s innovation-centric Machine Identity Management Development Fund fuels automation with integrations from the coolest developers, such as Entro, Corsha, Otterize, Nirmata, Device Authority and more. In addition, high-profile industry leaders have chosen to integrate with Venafi, including the exclusive Red Hat Certified Ansible Collection and F5 native product integrations with BIG IQ and Silverline. Venafi is also the first CLM supported in HashiCorp Vault Cloud, as well as the first native CLM integration in OpenShift built and supported by Red Hat. Additional integrations of note are built by leaders such as IBM, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, Citrix, and many, many more. These organizations simply don’t engage at this level with just any company. And no other CLM tool provider can match this ecosystem of automation for machine identities across the enterprise.
- Policy enforcement through certificate self-service.
Venafi has long recognized that providing self-service administration is the most effective way to control security policies for certificates. To that end, we have offered a robust self-service portal for the past several years. And through our SaaS offering, TLS Protect Cloud, these self-service capabilities are available anywhere, at any time. Plus, we integrate with leading ITSM solutions, like ServiceNow and Atlassian, to streamline self-service capabilities within the systems that certificate requesters and owners are already familiar with.
- Granular policy enforcement from the ground to the cloud.
Venafi invented how to apply policy for CLM, and that capability is now available anywhere with TLS Protect Cloud and in most modern environments with TLS Protect for Kubernetes and Venafi Firefly.
We believe that this recognition of the importance of the certificate management lifecycle is no surprise to us. We have been working tirelessly behind the scenes 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.
Gartner, Effectively Manage Your Organization’s Certificates, By Analyst(s): Paul Rabinovich, Erik Wahlstrom, Published 21 February 2024
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