TechValidate Research on Venafi

Introduction

This case study of a large enterprise financial services company is based on an August 2015 survey of Venafi customers by TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service.

Challenges

• Managed their keys and certificates using manual tracking and management (e.g., spreadsheet) before Venafi.
• Problem solved using Venafi:
  • Data Security / SSL Inspection / Threat Detection

Use Case

• Venafi products currently being used:
  • TrustAuthority SSL
  • TrustAuthority Mobile
• Systems integrated with Venafi:
  • Public Certificate Authority
  • Private Certificate Authority
  • Databases
  • Load Balancers
  • Web Servers
  • Application Servers
  • Security Applications

Results

• Improved their internal IT services SLA from days to hours with Venafi.
• Found additional keys and certificates using Venafi that were previously unknown.
• Key and certificate visibility improved by 76-100% after finding additional keys and certificates using Venafi.
• Vulnerabilities to be addressed with Venafi:
  • Heartbleed
  • SHA-1 to SHA-2 migration
  • The use of secure key length
  • Key and certificate ownership identification
  • Key and certificate lifecycle policies

Introduction

This case study of Equifax is based on an April 2017 survey of Venafi customers by TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service.

Challenges

The business challenges that led the profiled company to evaluate and ultimately select Venafi:

• Overcame the following challenges after using Venafi automation:
  • Automating the entire certificate lifecycle to improve security
  • Reducing risk by eliminating manual processes for vulnerability remediation
  • Distributing keys and certificates to security technologies for visibility / inspection
• Experienced the following operational challenges before using Venafi:
  • High costs of certificate lifecycle management
  • Ineffective use of IT personnel
  • Slower delivery because of a lack of API integration with DevOps or cloud services
  • Missed or lengthy Internal SLAs for certificate-dependent IT services
  • Impacts on reliability and/or availability because they had no visibility into certificate expiry periods
• Faced the following security challenges before using Venafi:
  • Increasing risk because keys and certificates rotated at annual or longer intervals
  • Being limited to reactive, instead of proactive, security because they didn’t have a policy enforcement

Use Case

The key features and functionalities of Venafi that the surveyed company uses:

• Uses Venafi key and certificate automation for:
  • Automated certificate management
  • Scalability of certificate distribution for deployment of encryption-dependent technologies
  • Incident response

Results

The surveyed company achieved the following results with Venafi:

• Agrees that Venafi helped them make better use of dynamic IT services by using APIs to automate support for DevOps platforms
• Went from 50 people managing their PKI before using Venafi to 10 people after using Venafi automation.
• Venafi automation helped improve security with:
  • Policy enforcement
  • Workflow for accountability
  • Automatic certificate revocation when services are no longer in use