Conjur
Modernizing PAM and Secrets Management with Machine Identity

“PAM for the Modern Era” is Conjur’s mantra to protect its clientele against outside attackers and malicious insiders. The use of cloud and DevOps in IT organizations has reached a tipping point due to its ability to bring agility in application development and deployment. With this accelerated adoption, there has been a corresponding surge in the need and demand to secure those models and deployment paradigms. “Conjur is the first solution for PAM (Privileged Access Management) and Secrets Management that is targeted at DevOps automation and built for cloud elasticity and scale,” says Elizabeth Lawler, CEO and Co-founder of Conjur. She continues, “Our platform is built around the core principle that traditional security solutions for secrets management are not fit-for-purpose in the Modern Era of Clouds, Containers, and DevOps.”

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts, Conjur has taken aim at solving the PAM, or Secrets Management, problem for organizations that are using DevOps delivery pipelines to build and deploy applications across one or more cloud providers, in their own on-premises data centers, or in a hybrid model. This is a pain point where companies across all industries are looking for robust solutions and Conjur claims clients in Financial Services, Healthcare, High-Tech, Media & Entertainment, and other verticals.

Conjur differentiates itself along three important axes:

- Total automation via API access for PAM and Secrets Management use cases which continues to be an area where legacy PAM providers continue to struggle

Conjur is the first solution for PAM and Secrets Management that is targeted at DevOps automation and built for cloud elasticity and scale

- Enterprise-grade capabilities including compliance reporting, high-availability, elastic scalability and performance, and “GUI for everything” that will drive adoption not just in the DevOps community but with InfoSec, Audit/ Compliance, and the CISO

- Machine identity for non-human actors to be appropriately provisioned, authenticated, authorized, and audited–a crucial capability when dealing with massive quantities of hosts, VMs, containers, and micro-services

It is this last notion of Machine Identity that sets Conjur apart from all the other players in this space. With the proliferation of cloud adoption, container-based deployments, and true micro services-based architectures, non-human actors will comprise the majority of identities that need to be secured and managed. Conjur offers machine identity constructs that can assign identities and perform authentication based on various attributes including host API key, environment API, container application ID, and custom metadata. Combined with Conjur’s RBAC model, this support for machine identity will enable organizations to achieve deployment scale across globally disparate data centers and with distributed administrative and SecOps teams.

Conjur also shows significant go-to-market maturity. It has embraced the rich and diverse Cloud and DevOps ecosystem and touts integration and support for Puppet, Chef, Docker, Jenkins, AWS, Azure, and many other key pieces of a modern DevOps and Cloud toolchain. One example they cite is their inclusion as a founding partner of Puppet’s Technology Alliance Partner Program (TAPP) and their recent announcement with ShadowSoft, a mutual partner and distributor of the joint solution.

This is not the first time Conjur is being recognized. In the past several months, the company has been listed in the Top 10 Cloud Security Providers 2016 by Enterprise Security Magazine and as one of CRN’s Top 15 Coolest Vendors in IAM and Data Security 2017.

Organizations that need enterprise-grade secrets management at high-velocity and cloud scale should take a strong look at Conjur.