75% of DevOps professionals say certificate issuance policies slow them down
Machine identity protection provider Venafi has announced the results of a survey on digital certificate security policies and practices in DevOps environments.
The survey evaluated the opinions of 108 professionals attending the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
According to Venafi's survey, 75% of DevOps professionals are concerned that policies for issuing certificates slow down development, and over a third (39%) believe developers should be able to circumvent these policies to meet service level agreements.
In addition, less than half (48%) of those surveyed believe developers in their organisation always request certificates through the security team-approved methods and channels.
Cryptographic keys and certificates serve as machine identities and enable authentication and secure communication for applications, service containers and APIs on enterprise networks, the internet and in cloud environments.
The use of weak or unauthorised keys and certificates can significantly increase security risks, particularly in cloud environments.
Developers use insecure machine identities, including certificates from unauthorised certificate authorities (CAs) and self-signed or wild card certificates, because corporate certificate issuance processes are seen as too cumbersome.
Unfortunately, this leaves security teams in the dark and increases organisational risk, especially if key and certificate vulnerabilities or errors enter production environments.
DevOps is all about speed, but this survey illustrates that developers often find security policies slow, says Venafi security strategy and threat intelligence vice president Kevin Bocek.
Unfortunately, security professionals are often unaware of the risks DevOps processes bring to their organisations.
Ultimately, security teams need to make it more straightforward for developers to use machine identities protecting them must be easier and faster than it is to circumvent policy, otherwise these problems will continue to grow exponentially.
Organisations that rely on DevOps processes require visibility, intelligence and automation to protect their machine identities.
About Venafi
Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader and inventor of machine identity protection, securing machine-to-machine connections and communications.
Venafi protects machine identity types by orchestrating cryptographic keys and digital certificates for SSL/TLS, IoT, code signing, mobile and SSH.
