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Venafi Introduces Control Plane for Machine Identity Management

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David Marshall | Published: October 12, 2022

Venafi unveiled the Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities. The Venafi Control Plane unifies machine identity management across all identity types; in data centers, cloud, hybrid environments and at the edge. The Venafi Control Plane enables customers to accelerate digital transformation, increase development speed, reduce security risk and eliminate business disruptions.

“Venafi partners with the largest, most complex organizations in the world, and our solutions secure the vast majority of the digital infrastructure that runs our modern world,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi.  “These partnerships have given us a deep understanding of the complexity created by digital transformation and the shift to hybrid and cloud native architectures. Today, a typical global organization has hundreds of thousands of machines – which include applications, APIs, containers and microservices, in addition to physical devices — spread across a wide variety of environments. Each one of these machines requires an identity. At Venafi, we know how costly and slow it is to build identity-based, zero trust architectures in these complicated, rapidly changing environments. The Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities is unmatched in reducing complexity and increasing the speed of development, while at the same time increasing security for machine identities which are the foundation of trust in our modern world.” 

There are two actors on every network: people and machines. People rely on usernames, passwords and two-factor authentication to gain access to data and services. Machines also need identities for the same reasons. Rapid adoption of cloud infrastructures requires a greater number and variety of machine identities, many of which change rapidly because they are ephemeral. For example, some cloud native environments require huge volumes of certificates (one of many different types of machine identities) with near zero latency. Organizations spend millions of dollars managing human identities but are just realizing the criticality of security and protecting machine identities.

The Venafi Control Plane is the only control plane for machine identity management designed to deliver observability, consistency, reliability and freedom of choice across clouds, hybrid environments, data centers and the edge.

The Venafi Control Plane delivers core capabilities directly and distributes or delegates them within reusable patterns and policy controls. Together these capabilities support cradle-to-grave machine identity lifecycle orchestration, authentication, authorization and governance providing customers with immediate value, including:

    • Elimination of outages on customer-facing infrastructure, which saves an average $9.3 million of revenue per hour for financial services firms
    • Dramatic reduction in the risk of data breaches that cost, on average, $5.97 million per breach
    • Improvement of machine identity management efficiency, increasing productivity by as much as 98%

    To ensure these capabilities are available in even the most demanding edge and cloud native environments, Venafi is also announcing early access to a new Venafi Control Plane service: Fast Issuance. Fast Issuance is an ultra low-latency service for issuing machine identities at speed with zero dependencies. The Fast Issuance service enables local issuance for entities or services that require machine identities to be delivered at scale with near-to-zero latency. Fast Issuance can be used in any environment: cloud native, data center, hybrid or edge.