F5 integrates BIG-IQ into Venafi Machine Identity Protection Platform
F5 Networks has built native integration capabilities for the Venafi Machine Identity Protection Platform into the F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management solution.
The new native Venafi integration with BIG-IQ helps protect organisations by allowing network operations to orchestrate the entire lifecycle of SSL/TLS certificates, scale the process at DevOps speed and ensure security policies are enforced across F5 devices.
"As digital transformation drives the need for DevOps, multi-cloud and microservice strategies, the number of machine identities – like TLS keys and certificates – on enterprise networks is exploding," says Venafi security strategy and threat intelligence vice president Kevin Bocek.
"Without automation for TLS keys and certificates, businesses can be hampered by costly outages from expired certificates. In spite of suffering from these avoidable errors, organisations often try solving these problems by cobbling together scripts and spreadsheets. Our new combined solution provides mutual customers with extensive visibility and intelligence, making it easy for teams using F5's BIG-IP to protect their TLS certificates.
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management offers organisations complete lifecycle management for BIG-IP application services and devices – enabling them to provide the availability, performance and security necessary to achieve digital transformation goals.
With the latest release of BIG-IQ, enterprises can orchestrate and inject automation into the process of assigning and managing TLS keys with the Venafi Platform, removing the complexity of TLS key and certificate usage.
BIG-IQ customers can connect to more than 40 certificate authorities (CAs) supported by the Venafi Platform.
In addition, security policies are enforced without slowing BIG-IP operations.
Key benefits of the integration include:
Accelerated innovation and increased scalability. The integration automates complex machine identity installation and configuration across BIG-IP environments using BIG-IQ Centralized Management automation.
Streamlined operations through automation. Enterprises can avoid human error and bottlenecks caused by manual oversight of machine identities with BIG-IQ and Venafi.
Outage and downtime prevention. The F5 integration with Venafi prevents incidents and outages associated with expired certificates and helps avoid issues stemming from the recertification process.
Increased security. The solution uses security team-approved policies and provides visibility into machine identities used across BIG-IP deployments.
Reduced administrative overhead. The integration simplifies and accelerates the ability to secure machine identities – for physical and virtual machines – across complex infrastructures.
"The integration of BIG-IQ and the Venafi Trust Protection Platform significantly accelerates the delivery of secure, compliant certificates to devices, applications, containers and algorithms that require them to connect and communicate securely," says F5 business development senior vice president Calvin Rowland.
"This is a key security capability for organizations moving more workloads to the cloud, embracing DevOps methodologies, and adopting technologies such as IoT and AI.
