Venafi Enhances Encryption Management

SAN FRANCISCO Venafi Inc. today announced the May availability of Venafi Encryption Director V.1, a comprehensive, enterprise-wide encryption management platform that centralizes and automates the management of encryption keys and certificates in the infrastructure, as well as across diverse encryption systems, operating environments, applications, and certificate authorities.

Built on an extensible architecture that leverages the core lifecycle management functionality of previous releases, the broader, more holistic approach to encryption management in Director delivers improved key management, data security, critical system uptime, operational efficiency and compliance readiness. With the ever-expanding use of—and dependence on—encryption in recent years comes an increasing need for organizations to institute rigorous operational procedures, automated processes and security best practices.

Traditional, largely manual approaches to encryption management have proven limited and error-prone, expose organizations to unnecessary risk, and often result in unanticipated security issues and system outages. This is especially true when keys and certificates are managed in silos and, in the case of certificates, are issued from a variety of certificate authorities (CA) and deployed across disparate systems and applications.

"Today, the majority of encryption and key management solutions are limited in scope, and in many cases, are customizable toolkits that only manage vendors' own encryption technologies with little or no out-of-the-box integration with other encryption systems," said Paul Turner, VP of product and customer solutions, Venafi. "While key management standards are being developed to enable broad interoperability, organizations need an enterprise-wide encryption management platform today that truly manages all existing and new encryption keys and certificates independent of platform, target application or CA. That's what Venafi Encryption Director brings to the market."

Unlike other encryption management platforms, Venafi Encryption Director provides:

Network-based discovery of encryption technologies to enable an inventory of keys and certificates that have already been deployed and are in operation

Continuous, policy-based monitoring and validation of encryption technologies and configurable notifications to assure administrators are proactively alerted of impending issues

Concurrent management of enrollment for large numbers of administrators, including full integration with multiple, leading CAs

Full, end-to-end provisioning and lifecycle management of encryption keys and certificates—including all necessary steps from key generation, installation across multiple systems, rotation, to backup/recovery and other critical functions

Key benefits include:

Policy Compliance and Audit Enforcement

CA Spend Management and Strategic Sourcing

Proactive Incident Prevention and Reporting

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Reduced Administrative Workload

The upgrades in Venafi Encryption Director V.1 include enhanced workflow and routing, support for additional manual and automated lifecycle management processes, and additional support for managing the broad number of encryption types and credentials in use today, including symmetric keys, certificates, asymmetric keys, and passwords.

Director Product Editions The Director product line consists of three product editions: Monitoring Edition, Enrollment Edition and Provisioning Edition, and each includes the Discovery Engine. Additional information on Venafi Encryption Director is available at www.venafi.com/Director.