RegTech company Venafi has launched the Machine Identity Protection Development Fund to support developers and vendors in the sector.
The first tranche of the vehicle has a capital pool of $12.5m and will offer developers with direct sponsorship from Venafi to aid the delivery of comprehensive protection for all machine identities.
With the Machine Identity Protection Development Fund, Venafi aims to sponsor a range of developers including consultants, systems integrators, startups, open-source developers and other cybersecurity vendors. Those to receive funding will create integrations which ensure every new machine identity is automatically updated in the Venafi platform, the company said.
Developers are encouraged to develop solutions automating or improving intelligence and visibility of machine identity technologies, such as blockchain distributed ledgers, AI, machine learning, DevOps and Secure Shell, among others.
Alongside the launch of the fund, Venafi has revealed its first three investments.
The first is Jetstack, an open-source developer helping organisations to launch Kubernetes in their production environments. With the funds, the company is looking to support the development of its automation software. Through Venafi’s support, security administrators will be able to validate and audit the current state of certificates used in Kubernetes.
Software consultancy startup OpenCredo also received support from Venafi and is using the funds to create an open-source Kafka (a big data system) with the Secure Shell cryptographic network. This service will utilise machine identity intelligence from Venafi to feed graph databases, to help organisations to identify SSH machine identity risks, vulnerabilities and anomalies in real time.
The final company to receive funds, so far, is Cygnacom, a developer of public key infrastructure and identity and access management solutions. Through Venafi’s certificate authority service, Cynacom built the eConnector which helps authorise PKI on the Venafi platform. Capital from the funding will be used to develop the platform further and automate the machine identity life cycle.
Venafi vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence Kevin Bocek said, “The Machine Identity Protection Development Fund is the next logical step for cybersecurity.
“While we spend over $8 billion protecting the identities of humans on our networks, we invest very little in time, resources and money to safeguard the identities of machines, especially those used in the cloud, in DevOps environments and on IoT devices.
“As the volume, velocity, variety and volatility of machines continue to increase, the need for comprehensive machine identity protection grows exponentially.”
Venafi is a cybersecurity platform which is focused on machine identity protection, securing machine-to-machine connections and communications. The platform verifies machine devices and any risks the present, in order to provide security of communications and data sharing between devices.
Earlier in the year, Venafi closed a round of funding on $100m to support its Machine Identity Protection Development Fund.
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