TechValidate Research on Venafi

Introduction

This case study of a large enterprise transportation services company is based on a September 2015 survey of Venafi customers by TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service. The profiled company asked to have their name blinded to protect their confidentiality.

Challenges

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

• Managed their keys and certificates using manual tracking and management (e.g., spreadsheet) before Venafi.
• Problems solved using Venafi:
  • Identity and access management (including privileged access management / SSH)
  • PKI refresh

Use Case

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

• Venafi products currently being used:
  • TrustAuthority SSL
  • TrustAuthority SSH
  • TrustForce SSL
  • TrustForce SSH
  • TrustNet
• Systems integrated with Venafi:
  • Public Certificate Authority
  • Private Certificate Authority

Results

The surveyed company achieved the following results with Venafi:

• Improved their internal IT services SLA from weeks to days with Venafi.
• Found 1500 additional keys and certificates using Venafi that were previously unknown.
• Key and certificate visibility improved by 51-75% after finding additional keys and certificates using Venafi.
• Vulnerabilities to be addressed with Venafi:
  • Heartbleed
  • SSL inspection for threats
  • SHA-1 to SHA-2 migration
  • The use of secure key length
  • Key and certificate ownership identification
  • Key and certificate lifecycle policies
  • SSH misuse
  • Certificate reputation

Challenges

• Business challenges that led to purchasing Venafi:
  • Avoid certificate-related outages
  • Automate certificate management to lower costs and resource usage
  • Secure privileged access (IAM, including SSH)
  • Achieve compliance / audit remediation

Budget Justification

• PKI Administration took the lead in purchasing Venafi.

Results

• Has > 75 lines of business or departments directly interacting with the Venafi platform.
• Top benefits experienced or will experience with Venafi:
  • Prevented and remediated outages
  • Increased compliance
  • Improved labor / cost savings
• Will save 3 FTEs annually by using Venafi.
• Saved $150,000 annually by using Venafi.

Next Steps

• Plans to expand their use of Venafi in the following ways:
  • Expand their use of Venafi to other use cases (e.g., code-signing, SSH, Mobility, DevOps support, etc.)
  • Expand their use of Venafi to cover more keys and/or certificates