Venafi Encryption Director 6 Now Shipping; Provides Enterprise Organizations Automated Encryption Key and Digital Certificate Management and Risk Assessment Solutions

Venafi, the inventor and market leader in Enterprise Key and Certificate Management (EKCM) solutions, today announced that the Venafi Encryption Director 6 (Director 6) platform is now generally available. Director 6 provides out-of-the box automated management capabilities for the widest range of digital certificate and encryption key technologies used by today's enterprises, including symmetric keys, SSH keys, asymmetric keys and digital certificates. Director 6 automates the discovery, monitoring, validation, management and security for the most commonly used encryption assets in Global 2000 enterprises—which report widespread success in reducing the unquantified and unmanaged risks of encryption deployments that result in data breaches, security audit failures and unplanned system outages.

"Major breaches at Sony, Lockheed Martin, L3, Epsilon and EMC have driven organizations to deploy more and more encryption technologies. These organizations need to be careful though, as encryption can actually increase risk and reduce security if deployed or managed improperly. One lost encryption key can expose regulated data and one expired certificate can halt critical systems," said Richard Stiennon, noted author, speaker and principal analyst at IT Harvest. "IT security professionals that use encryption need solutions that will allow them to retain control. With more effective controls, they can more securely manage the thousands of encryption keys and certificates they have deployed."

"Encryption has grown organic—both across their global infrastructures and as they move data and applications into the cloud," said Jeff Hudson, Venafi CEO. "Another reality is that the keys and certificates are not well managed. Recent research exposes disturbing facts. Companies have little idea how many of these encryption key and certificate assets they have in their networks, where they are deployed, who has access to them or how they are managed. This situation has resulted in systemic unquantified and unmanaged risk. The effects are costly and include security breaches, audit failures and unplanned downtime."

With over eight years experience delivering best-of-breed encryption key and certificate management solutions to the world's largest organizations in financial services, insurance, high tech, telecommunications, aerospace, healthcare, retail and other industries, Venafi delivers a true enterprise platform, capable of spanning organizations' diverse infrastructures independent of the encryption assets and the complexity or size of the environment. With its third-generation architecture Director 6—easy-to-deploy, interoperable and scalable—orchestrates key and certificate management across multiple encryption types, operating environments, certificate authorities (CAs), HSMs, applications, directories and other enterprise systems.

Director 6 delivers two new products to the marketplace. In addition to the already-available Certificate Manager™SSH Key Manager™ and Symmetric Key Manager™ are now available as stand-alone offerings that help organizations manage the security, compliance and security risks of enterprise key and certificate deployments. In addition, Director 6 provides the following:

Agent-based Onboard Discovery and Monitoring
Advanced Management Partitioning across Firewall Boundaries
Enhanced Operational Network Validation and Alerting
Advanced Event Lifecycle Management with Validation and Workflow
Expanded Analysis and Reporting of Consolidated Key and Certificate Management Logs
Actionable Key and Certificate Management Dashboard

Product Availability

Venafi Encryption Director 6, including Symmetric Key Manager™, Certificate Manager™ and SSH Key Manager™, is now available for customers. For more information on Director 6, visit www.venafi.com/products/.

Demo Director 6 and Venafi Session Session at Black Hat 2011

Black Hat USA 2011 attendees are invited to view demonstrations of Director 6 at Venafi's booth, 701; Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, NV. The Venafi team of experts will be available Wednesday, August 3 and Thursday, August 4 during exhibit hours to answer your questions and to provide you with a free risk assessment, ranking how well your organization follows 12 IT security and compliance best practices against 420 enterprises in a recent Venafi study. Black Hat attendees who take the assessment are eligible to win an Apple iPad 2. During Black Hat, Joe Skehan, Director of Product and Customer Research at Venafi, will present "SSH as the next back door. Are you giving hackers root access?" on Wednesday, August 3 at 1:45 p.m. in the Florentine Room.