Venafi, the inventor and leader in machine identity management, introduces Firefly. The solution supports highly distributed cloud-native environments. As part of Venafi's machine identity control plan, it enables easy and secure implementation of developer-driven machine identity management requirements for cloud-native workloads.
Machine identities such as TLS and SPIFFE are deployed locally and at high speed in any environment. By adding speed, reliability, and security to machine identities in modern environments, organizations can ensure trust in issued certificates and compliance with corporate security policies while driving application development and digital transformation.
Machine identities in modern application areas
“With the increasing number of enterprises migrating to modern, cloud-native, and highly distributed structures, the demand for machine identities in modern use cases that need to be delivered at scale and with near-zero latency to meet key requirements increases to fulfill the authentication,” says Shivajee Samdarshi, chief product officer at Venafi. “Firefly addresses these critical challenges in a fast, simple, and secure manner. It reduces security risks while avoiding inefficiencies that often bog down development teams, and future-proofs organizations for the challenges of tomorrow.”
Easy to implement container
Firefly is delivered as an easy-to-deploy container that runs in any cloud-native environment, providing a fast, simple, and secure way to issue machine identities. The identity policies for machines are set in the Venafi Control Plane and propagated to the Firefly instances. Together, Venafi Control Plane and Firefly provide a lightweight, distributed structure. It provides high-speed, local, autonomous output that cloud-native, low-latency use cases and advanced CI/CD require with an identity provider embedded in the pipeline.
Key features include:
- observability - By the Venafi control tarpaulin Firefly provides visibility into distributed output activity. This extends control plane observability of machine identities from the data center to the cloud and edge.
- consistency - Firefly gives security teams control over machine identity policies issued to modern applications in cloud native environments, ensuring developers are using a secure and consistent issuer.
- Reliability – Firefly requires little production deployment infrastructure to achieve high availability and fault tolerance.
- Freedom of choice - Firefly offers multiple deployment options including cloud native, DevOps, cloud and federated PKI environments, giving developers the flexibility to deploy Firefly wherever and whenever needed.
“At Diebold Nixdorf, moving from legacy applications to cloud-native is a priority for us. We must give developers and platform teams a way to issue and provide machine identities, the solution must be lightweight, work on all cloud platforms. In addition, it must be fast and easy to implement,” says Scott Barronton, CISO at Diebold Nixdorf. “Venafi Firefly meets these requirements. It also provides security teams with visibility and policy control over machine identities. It combines the best of both worlds – we can work as fast as we need to and in a safe way.”
Additional information:
- Announcement blog post
- Introducing Venafi Firefly Video
- Venafi Firefly Data Sheet
- Venafi Firefly Deployment Patterns White Paper
About Venafi Venafi is the leader in cybersecurity for machine identity management. From the foundation 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 types of machine identities and their associated security and reliability risks.