CyberArk Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Machine Identity Management Leader Venafi from Thoma Bravo

CyberArk (NASDAQ: CYBR), the identity security company, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Venafi, a leader in machine identity management, from Thoma Bravo. This acquisition will combine Venafi’s best-in-class machine identity management capabilities with CyberArk’s leading identity security capabilities to establish a unified platform for end-to-end machine identity security at enterprise scale.

Digital transformation and ongoing cloud migration have led to an exponential increase in the number of machine identities, such as workloads, code, applications, IoT devices and containers. The number of machines is rapidly outpacing the growth in their human counterparts, with more than 40 machine identities for every human identity. Left unprotected, they serve as a lucrative hunting ground for cybercriminals. These machine identities need to be discovered, managed, secured and automated to keep their connections and communications safe. This is made more complex by shorter certificate lifecycles, from 398 to 90 days, and the need to be quantum ready.

According to Forrester¹, “Historically, enterprises have taken less interest in managing machine identities compared with human identities, in part because machine identities present different requirements and more complicated lifecycle challenges. However, the exponential growth of machine identities, both for devices and cloud workloads, has brought attention and urgency to improving machine identity management to reduce the risks stemming from this expanded threat surface. Machine identity growth will outpace human identities, necessitating advanced and automated approaches to effectively manage machine identities and associated risks.”

The combination of Venafi’s certificate lifecycle management, private Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), IoT identity management and cryptographic code signing, with CyberArk’s secrets management capabilities will enable organizations to protect against misuse and compromise of machine identities, vastly improve security, and stop costly outages. Having a breadth and depth of options for machine identity security all in one solution – that can be deployed as SaaS or hybrid – will enable faster risk mitigation for organizations of all sizes looking to secure modern cloud environments.