• Venafi taps experienced industry veteran to lead the company as growth accelerates

Last week Venafi, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise digital certificate and encryption key management, bolstered its market leadership with the appointment of experienced executive and technology thought leader Jeffrey Hudson as chief executive officer (CEO).

A key executive in four successful high-technology start-ups that have gone public, Hudson brings over 25 years of experience in information technology and security management to Venafi. Hudson has spent a significant portion of his career developing and delivering leading edge technology solutions for financial services and other Global 2000 companies.

Hudson said: "I see a great opportunity for Venafi to reinforce and extend its leadership position in the enterprise digital certificate and encryption key management market. Venafi invented the first application for this market and has been granted several significant patents. As the market leader and pioneer, the company has uniquely amassed domain-specific expertise that helps customers solve a critical security management problem. The explosion in certificate and encryption key deployments is driving the need for an enterprise application to manage the provisioning, discovery, monitoring and management of these assets.”

Most recently Hudson was the CEO of Vhayu Technologies Corp. Vhayu was the market leader for the analysis and capture of market data, and was acquired by ThomsonReuters. Prior to Vhayu, Hudson held numerous executive leadership posts, including CEO and cofounder of MS2, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Informix Software, CEO of Visioneer, and numerous senior executive positions at NetFRAME Systems and WYSE Technology. Hudson began his career with IBM.

Venafi Encryption Director (Director) manages the lifecycle of hundreds of thousands of keys and certificates at the world's largest financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, government, aerospace and retail organizations. Director automates the provisioning, discovery, monitoring, and management of the digital certificates and encryption keys across heterogeneous operating systems, infrastructure applications, certificate authorities and hardware platforms from the desktop to the datacenter.

its survey finds over 78% of organisations have experienced downtime and financial losses due to mismanaged data encryption this year

Venafi, Inc. the leading provider of automated encryption management solutions including SSL certificate management and enterprise key management recently completed a survey of over 150 respondents entitled “Security and Availability: SSL Certificate and Key Management.” Venafi invited the 150-plus survey participants from the world’s largest companies to give their views on the problem of downtime caused by increasing encryption deployments, coupled with an acute lack of enterprise management controls.

The results of the survey were shocking:

• Participating organisations anticipate a 27% year-over-year certificate and key inventory growth rate
• 85% of organisations manage encryption certificates and private keys manually via spreadsheet and reminder notes
• 78% of organisations have experienced system downtime due to encryption failures in the past 12 months
• 96% of organisations use certificate based server-to-server and/or server-to-client mutual authentication for secure communications inside the firewall
• 71% of organisations have regulatory auditors assessing against private and asymmetric key management

Paul Turner, Vice President of Product and Customer Solutions at Venafi said: “This data validates what we’ve long seen at our Global 2000 installed base and prospect accounts. Certificate-based encryption deployments have exploded in recent years. Nearly every IT system and application relies on SSL certificates for trusted communications, including device and user authentication, in an effort to connect systems and users to the infrastructure securely. The result is that large enterprises are faced with the prospect of deploying and manually managing thousands and, in some cases, tens of thousands of certificates of keys.”

Encryption has become ubiquitous in today’s IT infrastructure and is a critical element of any security strategy with surging encryption volumes intended to secure communications and reduce vulnerabilities. When properly managed, encryption ensures against system downtime and failed audits. Yet leading organisations expose themselves to unnecessary risk and outages when encryption keys and certificates are not properly managed.

Without policy-based encryption management in place, system failure and data loss will continue to plague organisations of all sizes and industries with increasing cost and frequency.