Today we announced that Venafi has agreed to be acquired by CyberArk. We see this as a seminal moment in identity security.
Why do I think this is the case?
Because in the history of technology we’ve continually experienced prolonged periods of incremental change followed by sudden vertical leaps that change what is possible. In reality it’s the latter that is cited in the history books, while when we look back over time, we realize it was the former that made the vertical leap possible.
Venafi’s journey embodies the hard work and continued innovation it takes to fuel a vertical leap. In fact, for the Venafi team this journey started more than 25 years ago when they first pioneered the concept, then subsequently invented and delivered the technology at the foundation of a new category — machine identity management. Fast forward to today the company has a vibrant and growing customer base and portfolio of solutions that address machine and workload identity management in today’s cloud-first, GenAI, post-quantum world.
Why CyberArk? And why now?
Today’s news has the potential to supercharge our collective progress to-date and be transformative for the industry. Combining and strengthening our collective talent and market leading portfolios to address identity security requirements on a scope and scale beyond what is available today is important for all of us.
Why do we think this is the case?
If we take a lead from Gartner, whose most recent work on the topic essentially splits the identity security market into two main categories — Human and Machine, we see many if not all the same capabilities required to manage both. What is unique is the way they are put together to effectively manage the two differently, in a way that achieves the same outcome, “securing identity.”
What could be the impacts of a single solution for both?
The fact is between CyberArk and Venafi we are answering that question today. By bringing together Venafi’s best-in-class machine identity management capabilities in certificate lifecycle management, private PKI, IoT and cryptographic code signing with CyberArk’s secrets management, we start to see the makings of a unified, enterprise scale, end-to-end machine identity security platform coming into focus.
Could vendors autonomously achieve the same ends naturally over time?
Sure, but at what cost and over what time? When I think of the state of play in cybersecurity as AI becomes ubiquitous and post quantum cryptography becomes our reality, urgency is at a premium and as an industry we cannot afford to move at the natural speed of evolution.
With today’s announcement CyberArk is enabling identity security professionals to realize the vertical leap necessary to regain the advantage in a critical and fast-growing area of the modern attack surface and Venafi could not be more excited to be part of that.
Machine Identity Security Summit 2024
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