AWS Certificate Manager vs. Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities

I would always recommend AWS Certificate Manager for anyone using AWS cloud services. The perfect scenario would be with your domain managed by AWS Route 53 as you can obtain auto renewal of certificates with really good security for all your public facing application that uses CloudFront, ALB or API Gateway.

Incentivized

Venafi allows an engineer to automate the full provisioning process not only installing the certificate to multiple applications but also configuring specific requirements for that application.

Incentivized

• Issue, Renew and Validate SSL Certificates.
• Allows us to integrate it with other AWS Services.

• Digital Certificate Inventory Management and Monitoring
• Digital Certificate Lifecycle Processes to include ownership and roles and responsibilities
• Easy automation integration into many common products
• Certificate Trust Store Management

Incentivized

• Sometimes ACM certificates don't work with ELB.
• No automatic alert on certificate expiration.

Incentivized

• The Venafi platform is constantly evolving through its upgrades which occur every quarter to meet client's specific needs. This is an outstanding model however the documentation that follows the upgrades could be more thorough.

Incentivized

AWS historically has had very confusing interfaces. But in recent times they have improved them. AWS Certificate Manager is a clear sample of this. The interface is clear and straightforward, with no useless or cryptic options. Really I can't think of a way the interface could be better with the actual options available.

Incentivized

They do a great job.

Incentivized

Easy to implement within a few clicks, or even from command line, the alternatives doesn't integrate that easy with AWS Application Load Balancers or AWS CloudFront

Incentivized

Each public certificate provider has their own flavor of certificate automation, but they are not that flexible and only work with their own products. Certified Security Solutions CMS is a lightweight tool that directly competes with Venafi, but is not nearly as robust or feature risk. This is a straight forward management solution that is best fitted for the smaller companies.

Incentivized

• We're saving our spent on SSL certificates As it dosen't costs at all.
• Limited to AWS only, Certificates issued by ACM can be used with AWS managed services only.
• It doesn't support automatic domain verification with other DNS management systems.

• An outage is a very devastating event to any large corporation and can cost millions. Venafi's ability to prevent these outages has proven to be a great return on investment for our environment and has helped protect the bottom line.
• Venafi automates certificate installation with an included feature to schedule the install in advance. This is a great benefit of the tool because it eliminates human error and prevents any forgotten or overlooked certificates to be renewed. After installation Venafi will also validate the certificate to confirm that it has been installed properly. This shows just how thorough this tool really is.
• Security compliance is of the utmost importance in a large organization for auditing purposes and certificate security policies but at times can prove to be difficult to enforce. Venafi has proven to play a pivotal role in enforcing these policies in our environment.

Incentivized