Venafi Launches Venafi Firefly to Deliver Machine Identities for Modern, Cloud Native Workloads

Enables Organizations to Strengthen Security Posture While Accelerating Application Development

(KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023) – Venafi, the inventor of machine identity management, today introduced Venafi Firefly, the only lightweight machine identity issuer that supports highly distributed, cloud native environments. Part of the Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities, Firefly enables security teams to easily and securely meet developer-driven machine identity management requirements for cloud native workloads by issuing machine identities, such as TLS and SPIFFE, locally at high speeds across any environment. By delivering added speed, reliability and security for machine identities in modern architectures, it helps organizations ensure identities adhere to corporate security policies, while accelerating application development and digital transformation.

“With an increasing number of organizations moving to modern, cloud native architectures that are highly distributed, there is a growing need for machine identities in modern applications to be delivered at scale with near-zero latency to address key challenges around authentication,” said Shivajee Samdarshi, chief product officer at Venafi. “Venafi Firefly addresses these critical challenges in a fast, easy and secure way. It reduces security risks while also eliminating inefficiencies that often slow development teams down and future-proofing organizations against the challenges of tomorrow.”

Venafi Firefly is delivered as an easy-to-deploy container that can run in any cloud native environment, providing a fast, easy and secure way to issue machine identities. Machine identity policy is configured in the Venafi Control Plane and inherited by Firefly instances. Together, the Venafi Control Plane and Venafi Firefly provide a lightweight, distributed architecture that makes Firefly the only machine identity issuer for modern use cases requiring local high-speed autonomous issuance, low-latency cloud native use cases and advanced CI/CD with identity provider embedded in the pipeline.

Key capabilities include:

• Observability – Through the Venafi Control Plane, Venafi Firefly delivers visibility into distributed issuance activity. This extends Control Plane observability of machine identities from the datacenter to the cloud and the edge.

• Consistency – Venafi Firefly gives security teams control over policy for machine identities issued to modern applications in cloud native environments and ensures developers use a secure and consistent issuer.

• Reliability – Venafi Firefly requires minimal infrastructure to deploy in production to achieve high availability and fault tolerance.

• Freedom of Choice – Venafi Firefly has multiple deployment options, including cloud native, DevOps, cloud and federated PKI environments, giving developers flexibility to use Firefly wherever and whenever it's needed.

Venafi Firefly is unmatched in reducing complexity and increasing the speed of development, while at the same time increasing security for machine identities needed for modern cloud native applications.

“At Diebold Nixdorf, refactoring legacy applications to be cloud native is a priority for us. We need to give developers and platform teams a machine identity issuer that is lightweight, works on all cloud platforms, is super high speed and is easy to deploy,” said Scott Barronton, CISO at Diebold Nixdorf. “Venafi Firefly meets these required capabilities. In addition, it gives security teams visibility and policy control over machine identities. It combines the best of two worlds — we can go as fast as we need to and do so securely.”

Venafi Firefly is generally available today to all customers. To download a free trial, please visit https://venafi.com/try-venafi/firefly/.

Additional Resources

• Announcement Blog Post
• Introducing Venafi Firefly Video
• Venafi Firefly Data Sheet
• Venafi Firefly Deployment Patterns Whitepaper

About Venafi

Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader in machine identity management. From the ground to the cloud, Venafi solutions manage and protect identities for all types of machines—from physical and IoT devices to software applications, APIs and containers. Venafi provides global visibility, lifecycle automation and actionable intelligence for all machine identity types and the security and reliability risks associated with them.

With more than 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative machine identity management solutions for the world's most demanding, security-conscious organizations and government agencies, including the top five U.S. health insurers, top five U.S. airlines, top four payment card issuers and top four U.S. banks. As a leading provider of open source machine identity management solutions, its open source cert-manager project is downloaded more than 1.5 million times a day. For more information, visit https://venafi.com/.

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