Venafi to acquire Jetstack

“In the race to virtualize everything, businesses need faster application innovation and better security; both are mandatory,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi. “Most people see these requirements as opposing forces, but we don’t. We see a massive opportunity for innovation. This acquisition brings together two leaders who are already working together to accelerate the development process while simultaneously securing applications against attack, and there’s a lot more to do. Our mutual customers are urgently asking for more help to solve this problem because they know that speed wins, as long as you don’t crash.”

Digital transformation has completely disrupted application development and deployment. Cloud native platforms are making it possible for organizations to take advantage of all the cloud has to offer.  Application development decisions and power have shifted to developers. Developers are now creating a tidal wave of new machines across business units, clouds and continents in seconds, including:

·       Kubernetes clusters  

·       Cloud instances 

·       Service mesh

·       Microservice APIs

Every machine requires a unique identity to connect, communicate, and execute securely. Developers demand the fastest, easiest and most agile ways to build with TLS, SSH, and code signing certificates, all of which serve as machine identities. Security teams using manual operations are overwhelmed by the tsunami of new machines unleashed by developers and are struggling to keep up.

“The move to cloud-native platforms has shifted the way applications are developed and deployed,” said Tim Callahan, senior vice president and global chief
security officer for Aflac, and Venafi customer advisory board member. “This shift is a major disruption in the way we secure digitally transformed organizations. Every organization needs the right tools and training to make it easy for developers to use machine identities correctly while, at the same time, providing InfoSec teams with the information they need to keep the organization secure.”

Venafi and Jetstack are uniquely positioned to deliver this solution. Venafi’s innovative solutions protect TLS, SSH and code signing machine identities for the largest, most security-conscious organizations and government agencies in the world. Jetstack supports and advises enterprises using Kubernetes in mission-critical infrastructure. Leveraging real-life, operational experience, Jetstack fostered the Cert-manager open source community, which has hundreds of code contributors and millions of downloads.

Jetstack and Venafi have been working closely together over the last two years to dramatically accelerate the speed of innovation for next generation machine identity protection in Kubernetes, multi-cloud, service mesh and microservices ecosystems.  They share a vision of how to deliver machine identity protection to developers in modern, cloud native infrastructures.  

Cert-manager, Jetstack’s most popular open source software, is an example of this new breed of solutions; it is the fastest and easiest way for developers to create, connect and consume certificates with Kubernetes and cloud native tools. It is used in production Kubernetes and OpenShift multi-cloud infrastructure by many of the largest banks, retailers, airlines, and media companies, powering some of the world’s most popular consumer web and mobile applications.

“At Jetstack we help customers realize the benefits of Kubernetes and cloud native infrastructure, and we see transformative results to businesses firsthand,” said Matt Bates, CTO and co-founder of Jetstack. “We developed cert-manager to make it easy for developers to scale Kubernetes with consistent, secure, and declared-as-code machine identity protection. The project has been a huge hit with the community and has been adopted far beyond our expectations. Our team is thrilled to join Venafi so we can accelerate our plans to bring machine identity protection to the cloud native stack, grow the community and contribute to a wider range of projects across the ecosystem.”

“Nowadays, business success depends on how quickly you can respond to the market,” said Matt Barker, CEO and co-founder of Jetstack. “This reality led us to re-think how software is built and Kubernetes has given us the ideal platform to work from. However, putting speed before security is risky. By joining Venafi, Jetstack will give our customers a chance to build fast while acting securely.”