Most DevOps pros feel proper certificate issuance policies slow them down

75% of DevOps professionals are concerned that policies for issuing certificates slow down development, and over a third (39%) believe developers should be able to circumvent these policies to meet service level agreements, according to a Venafi survey.

In addition, less than half (48%) of those surveyed believe developers in their organization always request certificates through the security team-approved methods and channels.

Cryptographic keys and certificates serve as machine identities and enable authentication and secure communication for applications, service containers and APIs on enterprise networks, the internet and in cloud environments. The use of weak or unauthorized keys and certificates can significantly increase security risks, particularly in cloud environments.

Developers use insecure machine identities, including certificates from unauthorized certificate authorities (CAs) and self-signed or wild card certificates, because corporate certificate issuance processes are seen as too cumbersome. Unfortunately, this leaves security teams in the dark and increases organizational risk, especially if key and certificate vulnerabilities or errors enter production environments.

“DevOps is all about speed, but this survey illustrates that developers often find security policies slow,” said Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi.

“Unfortunately, security professionals are often unaware of the risks DevOps processes bring to their organizations. Ultimately, security teams need to make it more straightforward for developers to use machine identities—protecting them must be easier and faster than it is to circumvent policy, otherwise these problems will continue to grow exponentially. Organizations that rely on DevOps processes require visibility, intelligence and automation to protect their machine identities.”