CyberArk centralizes security and secrets management

As an established leader in Identity Security, CyberArk helps the world’s leading organizations secure their most critical digital assets. Recognizing the burden that security can place on developers, CyberArk worked with Red Hat to launch a joint solution – a unified access-management tool that manages credentials, secrets, and other sensitive data at an enterprise-wide level through a single control panel. CyberArk customers now benefit from a unified and consistent platform to manage credentials for apps, scripts, and machines, and improved security of their container environments and automation scripts; resilience, strength, and security is built into development processes so that developers can focus on high-value tasks that deliver business-critical results.

Benefits: 

• Enabled streamlined and standardized security management
• Increased developer productivity and velocity 
• Allowed secure collaboration between departments

Organizations rely on secure applications to run their business. To speed up development cycles and improve security and compliance, many organizations are adopting approaches like DevSecOps, containers, and automation. 

As a leader in Identity Security, CyberArk technologies are primarily utilized to secure the financial services, energy, retail, healthcare and government industries against cyber threats. The company protects over 10,000 global businesses, including the majority of the Fortune 500. Most Fortune banks and insurance, pharmaceutical, energy, and manufacturing companies also trust CyberArk to keep them ahead of online threats. 

“Data breaches are front-page news, so security is top of mind for everyone,” said Niels van Bennekom, Product Manager, CyberArk. “The rise of cloud technologies and containerized environments is great for efficiency and agility, but they’re often targeted by attackers because they increase the attack surface. That also makes it difficult to manage credentials. Malicious attackers exploit unsecured secrets to steal data, extort money, and disrupt business.”

To protect client businesses against these attacks, CyberArk solutions focus on delivering Identity Security with intelligent Privilege Controls, and securing DevOps pipelines.

 “Security can be a burden for developers,” said van Bennekom. “They need to add and maintain security features, rotate credentials, and support audits and compliance requests. That can take up a lot of time and slow down development.”

Pipelines also typically comprise multiple tools and extensions, and there is a risk that each can become siloed with its own security and privacy environments. “Native solutions are often unable to share secrets with other tools securely,” said van Bennekom. “Increasing productivity is one of the biggest objectives for developers, and we wanted to address this with our joint solution with Red Hat. It’s a solution that offers our customers a central view and full control of privileged access management.”

CyberArk’s vision was to meet the high standards and demands of large and complex organizational environments with a solution that would allow developers to provide consistent security for sensitive information and credentials used by applications, scripts, and machines. It saw that Red Hat could provide complementary technologies that would enable the two businesses to jointly produce a secure DevOps environment that enabled process agility and flexibility. 

“We’re experts in Identity Security, while Red Hat brings the tools to automate and build cloud-native applications,” said van Bennekom. “Together, Red Hat and CyberArk unify security management, reduce risk, and minimize the attack surface, ensuring our customers’ containerized environments are protected.”

Red Hat and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner CyberArk help to improve security by centralizing secrets management—the privileged credentials required to access tools, apps, and data—and automating scripts. Together, they developed a joint solution, integrating CyberArk’s Conjur with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

The result is a unified access-management solution with a single control panel for managing credentials, secrets, and other sensitive data at an enterprise-wide level. Combining CyberArk’s technical prowess and its Conjur console with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform benefits developers, admins, and the security team by enhancing security, streamlining operations, and enabling faster, more secure deployments. With this joint solution, developers, admins, and security teams now have a single, comprehensive resource that enables application development and deployment from anywhere without compromising security. 

“You can protect, rotate, monitor, and manage secrets from the CyberArk Identity Security Platform,” said van Bennekom. “Users can define and enforce privileged access security policies, and ensure consistent protection and compliance. With greater control and visibility, managing security operations and audits is much simpler.”

Enabled streamlined and standardized security management

The CyberArk-Red Hat joint solution streamlines secrets management by giving developers a single console to manage credentials and policies for deployments. This also simplifies the process of eliminating redundant credentials and tools so they can be reused more efficiently. Users can also scale environments up or down automatically, knowing that if something breaks, Ansible Automation Platform will resolve any issues.

“More than 10 integrations are designed to enhance security and protect the automation environment for Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform; these include managing secrets for applications on Red Hat OpenShift, managing secrets for Ansible Automation Platform, and Privileged Session Management to Ansible Automation Platform,” said van Bennekom. “We certify those integrations on our marketplace to empower DevOps and security teams to automatically secure and manage the credentials and secrets used by IT resources and CI/CD tools.”

The operations teams also use integrations to simplify how they write and use playbooks to access credentials more securely, freeing them up to focus on more strategic tasks.

Increased developer productivity and velocity 

The joint CyberArk-Red Hat solution strengthens the application security posture without slowing development. Red Hat OpenShift allows developers to focus on creating code while enhancing security, and using Ansible Automation Platform eliminates the need for automation engineers. 

“Developers don’t have to worry about how to secure the credentials they use,” said van Bennekom. “If they want to connect an application to a database, hard coding the credentials into the app would be a security risk. But they can get around that using the CyberArk-Red Hat joint solution. It gives them peace of mind that they can comply with security policies without impacting development speeds.”

Allowed secure collaboration between departments 

Security teams can now deliver enterprise-wide policies or secrets management as a service much more easily with the CyberArk-Red Hat solution, without compromising on control or protection. They can also reduce risk and improve compliance by managing, rotating, monitoring, and auditing application credential access across DevOps and automation environments from one tool. 

“Exposed risk of applications in the environment can be reduced to improve the protection of identities,” said van Bennekom.

CyberArk’s customers now benefit from a platform that can consistently manage credentials for apps, scripts, and machines alongside human users thanks to the partnership and shared vision of CyberArk and Red Hat. This solution helps organizations to improve the security of container environments and automation scripts, and builds resilience, strength, and security into any environment. The joint CyberArk-Red Hat solution also offers the most extensive enterprise-level privileged access security portfolio available.

The native integration between CyberArk products and Red Hat OpenShift provides runtime authentication and role-based access controls to make sure only authorized containers receive secrets. The integration between CyberArk and Ansible Automation Platform also ensures greater resilience and a robust enterprise-wide security posture. 

“It’s a win-win for everyone. You get high availability, scalability, and high performance across a distributed architecture,” said van Bennekom. “Ansible playbooks can access managed secrets as needed, which means you don’t have to include unsecured secrets in the playbooks themselves. Other vendors have solutions for secrets management, but ours is portable across all clouds and on-premises, so you can develop and deploy anywhere.”