Venafi Survey: Seventy-Eight Percent Of Organizations Experienced Downtime Due To Mismanaged Encryption

ORLANDO, Fla. (BUSINESS WIRE) Venafi, Inc., the leading provider of automated encryption management solutions including SSL certificate management and enterprise key management recently hosted a live webinar entitled "Security and Availability: SSL Certificate and Key Management," with record registrations and attendance. Venafi invited the 150-plus registrants from the world's largest companies to weigh in on the market problem of downtime caused by increasing encryption deployments, coupled with an acute lack of enterprise management controls.

The results of the informal survey were shocking:
    * Organizations anticipate a 27 percent year-over-year certificate and key inventory growth rate
    * 85 percent of organizations manage encryption certificates and private keys manually via spreadsheet and reminder notes
    * 78 percent of organizations have experienced system downtime due to encryption failures in the past 12 months
    * 96 percent of organizations use certificate based server-to-server and/or server-to-client mutual authentication for secure communications inside the firewall
    * 71 percent of organizations have regulatory auditors assessing against private and asymmetric key management

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

"This data validates what we've long seen at our Global 2000 installed base and prospect accounts," said Paul Turner, Vice President of Product and Customer Solutions at Venafi. "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."

Without policy-based encryption management in place, system failure and data loss will continue to plague organizations of all sizes and industries with increasing cost and frequency. Venafi is following the webinar survey with a more in-depth survey and follow-on report the company plans to issue within the next 90 days. Take the brief, ten-question encryption survey today to see where your company or organization stacks up compared to your industry peers.