Venafi, inventor of systems management for encryption, today announced the summer release of its next-generation platform and product line, with enhancements across the four major functional areas of its systems management for encryption methodology: discovery, lifecycle management, application configuration and monitoring/reporting. Venafi Encryption Manager V will include management of additional encryption credential types, such as symmetric keys (also announced today) and enhanced audit capabilities, all further streamlining the management of encryption technologies, lowering the total cost of ownership across ever-expanding enterprise deployments. Venafi is demonstrating a pre-release version of Encryption Manager V at booth #2345 at RSA Conference 2008 this week in San Francisco.
Most organizations are struggling with operational and security issues due to the manual processes traditionally used to manage the lifecycles of their encryption keys and certificates. These manual processes can be inefficient, error-prone, insecure, and consume valuable administrative resources that could be better allocated to developing and implementing new business systems and responding to new business challenges. Meanwhile, regulatory bodies continue to craft new, more strict regulations, costs continue to increase and IT staff levels continue to remain stagnant or decrease.
"As organizations increasingly leverage encryption to protect sensitive data and systems, they are grappling to neutralize, or eliminate, the associated operational costs and risks of maintaining encryption configurations and credentials," said Trell Rohovit, President and CEO, Venafi. "In cooperation with our customers, we've continued to enhance our Systems Management for Encryption products to provide a framework for implementing best practices that give them control over encryption technologies throughout their environments. This will ultimately increase security while decreasing costs and risk."
Systems Management for Encryption is the practice of applying time-tested systems management practices and techniques-already in use for many of the most common computing environments-to encryption, and applying them horizontally across operating environments. Venafi products institutionalize these practices and techniques into an automation platform that enables the application of corporate and regulatory encryption policies in a consistent and repeatable fashion across desktops, network devices, servers and other applications and systems.
In addition, by automating the creation and management of keys and certificates, configuring the applications that use them and providing comprehensive tools to monitor and report on the status of every component being managed, Venafi significantly improves data security, critical system uptime, operational efficiency and audit readiness.
Major Enhancements in Next-Generation Platform
- Expanded Credential Types: Venafi Encryption Manager V expands the types of credentials that can be automatically maintained to include certificates, asymmetric keys, symmetric keys and other types of credentials, including the passwords used to protect encryption credentials. In the process of maintaining encryption keys and certificates, organizations must also manage a large number of passwords used to secure those credentials. Venafi simplifies the management and protection of these passwords to comply with organizational password policies. This often includes updating the systems or applications that use those passwords to access encryption keys to inform them when passwords have changed.
- Hierarchical Policy-based Management:A new hierarchical policy structure in Encryption Manager V allows for global policies to be inherited automatically, and for sub-polices to be defined more strictly for specific groups of systems and applications. For example, an organization may require a minimum key strength (e.g. 128 bit) be enforced globally throughout their infrastructure, but may have certain use cases where stronger security (e.g. 256 bit) is required. This new policy abstraction simplifies policy enforcement and provides compliance notifications to alert the appropriate people whenever systems are mis-configured or out of policy. In addition to enforcing security policies and monitoring compliance, the hierarchical policies streamline the work of operations teams by pre-populating configuration settings to further reduce configuration time and avert the errors that are common with manual entry.
- Enhanced Audit Capabilities: Organizations can configure the enhanced notification and logging engine in Encryption Manager V to send or log real-time events and alerts to one or more "channels"-including SMTP, SNMP, database, file, or API-and enforce escalation paths and policies for easy incorporation into existing event monitoring and management processes and systems.