Venafi is the best choice for complete Digital Certificate Lifecycle Management
Overall Satisfaction with Venafi
I have implemented Venafi at 2 previous employers for the entire organization. The first employer had a need to manage the entire Digital Certificate Lifecycle Process due to the explosion in Digital Certificate use cases, costly outages due to certificate expirations and the impact on operations. We were successfully able to automate certificate renewals for F5 Load balancers, Windows IIS 7/8 and Tealeaf devices.
The second employer was replacing a completely home grown system that was outdated and only handled the requests and approval process. We set up a fully integrated Venafi solution with an existing requesting system. We also heavily relied on and used Venafi's REST API for private and public cloud use cases. At the time of departure the other departments of the firm where looking into integrating Venafi into their systems as well.
- 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
- Exporting of Data to other reporting tools
- They should create a an OCSP option as Microsoft's implementation is poor
- Continue to improve their custom adaptor tool
- The biggest impact is preventing costly outages due to expired or compromised certificates
- The second biggest advantage is the savings in operational costs related to the implementation and renewal of certificates
- The biggest negative is the initial cost and start up of implementing Venafi.
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.