Protecting Machine Identity with Venafi and F5

Frank Strobel

While the term “machine identity” may trigger visions of SkyNet or Hal—or, for more contemporary consumers of pop culture, Breq or Murderbot—in reality it has nothing to do with conscious or self-aware computer systems. For better or worse, when we speak of machine identities, we’re simply talking about how to ensure an automated process can identify itself and, once that identity is established, how other automated systems and processes grant the appropriate level of access to relevant resources—and in turn deny access to everything else.

This concept is not new. What is relatively new is the scale at which it needs to be implemented. It’s likely that many of you recognize the process described above for its similarity to Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions. PAM semantics basically grant or deny humans access to non-human resources in relatively static IT environments. Today, however, IT environments are anything but static, and the need for access to non-human resources to other non-human resources has increased exponentially. And of course, it all takes place with high levels of concurrency and at massive scale.

Venafi is a true leader in protecting machine identities, and in fact they help secure some of the largest, most sensitive networks in use. With 30 patents in its portfolio, Venafi has pioneered solutions to secure the cryptographic keys and digital certificates that authorize and control machine-to-machine connections and communications—catching the attention (and business) of many Global 5000 organizations along the way.

Partnering with companies like Venafi is an important part of F5’s ability to ensure that our enterprise customers are able to meet the full range of challenges related to securing accelerated application delivery, from the data center to the cloud. Together, our two companies provide organizations the ability to operate with confidence through secure communication and connections, with a high level of trust in the machine identities on their network.

Our joint customers are application and networking experts, and these experts are keen to have access to increased native integrations and other advances in automation so they can securely scale across multi-cloud environments. F5 and Venafi integration ensures that customer organizations can simply and safely scale HTTPS for their applications, including automating and scaling applications across multi-cloud infrastructure. We accomplish this by:

• Integrating the Venafi system with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
• Automating key and certificate lifecycle processes so organizations can quickly deploy and use a wide range of applications and services from F5, including WAF, DDoS, and bot protection, and other security and performance services
• We are investigating building native integration for the Venafi Platform directly into F5 BIG-IQ, our automation and orchestration platform. This will enable customers to automate their infrastructure to launch new applications, protect against increasing threats, and scale across multiple cloud providers

To learn more about machine identity and how to protect your application infrastructure at scale, please join us for an hour-long live discussion with global CSO and cybersecurity experts, where we’ll showcase innovative and groundbreaking insights into securing your machines:

Machine Identity Protection LIVE
LIVESTREAM of innovative and groundbreaking insights
Thursday, December 13, 2018
9 a.m. – 10 a.m. PT

About the Author

Frank Strobel

More blogs by Frank Strobel