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Certificate-Related Outages Impact Most Businesses

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Certificate-related outages negatively impact the reliability and availability of vital systems and services, according to a new study by Venafi.

“Certificates and keys are identity and access management for machines, just like user names and passwords are for humans,” said Kevin Bocek, VP of Security Strategy and Threat Intelligence at Venafi. “Certificates allow machines to communicate securely and that makes them an essential, but underappreciated, part of every organization’s digital ecosystem and our global digital economy. When certificates expire unexpectedly, critical services can be impacted. Unfortunately, most businesses do not have the visibility or tools necessary to manage this fundamental element of cyber security and operational availability effectively.”

The primary study findings include:

■ The majority (79 percent) of respondents suffered at least one certificate-related outage in 2016.

■ Over a third (38 percent) suffered more than six certificate-related outages in 2016.

■ Almost one in twenty (4 percent) suffered 100 or more certificate-related outages in 2016.

■ Almost two-thirds (64 percent) said their organizations could not respond to a certificate-related security event in six hours or less.

As the use of encryption explodes, the challenges connected with effective key and certificate management have proliferated. Recent research showed dramatic growth in the use of keys and certificates, especially among large organizations.

One of the primary drivers behind the surge in certificate usage is the explosion in the number of IP-enabled devices on business networks. Another challenge organizations face is the adoption of DevOps and Fast IT development processes that dramatically increase the number of certificates needed. This increase in certificates and their corresponding keys compounds the serious security vulnerabilities associated with cryptographic key and digital certificate mismanagement.

Many businesses are still unaware of the scale of this problem. Venafi customer data shows that the average organization found over 16,500 unknown keys and certificates of which they were not previously aware. Also, the new study shows that most companies do not have control over their key and certificate inventory, do not have an automated process for renewals and have no central record of when certificates are due to expire:

■ Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of organizations do not manage all their keys and certificates centrally.

■ Of those that do manage certificates centrally, 65 percent rely on security controls from their Certificate Authorities (CAs), which limit their visibility to certificates provided by the issuing CA.

“The good news is that certificate-related outages are completely preventable, but you need to understand the scale and the scope of the problem,” continued Bocek. “As we use more cloud services, IoT devices and DevOps automation, certificate usage is skyrocketing. To keep up with this expanding problem, organizations must automate the discovery, issuance, lifecycle, and remediation of all keys and certificates from the data center to the cloud to the IoT edge of their networks. Failure to do so puts the reliability and availability of critical services at risk and dramatically increases cyber security risks.”

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Certificate-Related Outages Impact Most Businesses

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Certificate-related outages negatively impact the reliability and availability of vital systems and services, according to a new study by Venafi.

“Certificates and keys are identity and access management for machines, just like user names and passwords are for humans,” said Kevin Bocek, VP of Security Strategy and Threat Intelligence at Venafi. “Certificates allow machines to communicate securely and that makes them an essential, but underappreciated, part of every organization’s digital ecosystem and our global digital economy. When certificates expire unexpectedly, critical services can be impacted. Unfortunately, most businesses do not have the visibility or tools necessary to manage this fundamental element of cyber security and operational availability effectively.”

The primary study findings include:

■ The majority (79 percent) of respondents suffered at least one certificate-related outage in 2016.

■ Over a third (38 percent) suffered more than six certificate-related outages in 2016.

■ Almost one in twenty (4 percent) suffered 100 or more certificate-related outages in 2016.

■ Almost two-thirds (64 percent) said their organizations could not respond to a certificate-related security event in six hours or less.

As the use of encryption explodes, the challenges connected with effective key and certificate management have proliferated. Recent research showed dramatic growth in the use of keys and certificates, especially among large organizations.

One of the primary drivers behind the surge in certificate usage is the explosion in the number of IP-enabled devices on business networks. Another challenge organizations face is the adoption of DevOps and Fast IT development processes that dramatically increase the number of certificates needed. This increase in certificates and their corresponding keys compounds the serious security vulnerabilities associated with cryptographic key and digital certificate mismanagement.

Many businesses are still unaware of the scale of this problem. Venafi customer data shows that the average organization found over 16,500 unknown keys and certificates of which they were not previously aware. Also, the new study shows that most companies do not have control over their key and certificate inventory, do not have an automated process for renewals and have no central record of when certificates are due to expire:

■ Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of organizations do not manage all their keys and certificates centrally.

■ Of those that do manage certificates centrally, 65 percent rely on security controls from their Certificate Authorities (CAs), which limit their visibility to certificates provided by the issuing CA.

“The good news is that certificate-related outages are completely preventable, but you need to understand the scale and the scope of the problem,” continued Bocek. “As we use more cloud services, IoT devices and DevOps automation, certificate usage is skyrocketing. To keep up with this expanding problem, organizations must automate the discovery, issuance, lifecycle, and remediation of all keys and certificates from the data center to the cloud to the IoT edge of their networks. Failure to do so puts the reliability and availability of critical services at risk and dramatically increases cyber security risks.”

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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