First-Ever Merger Between Certificate Automation and Certificate Authority Providers Set to Impact IAM Strategy for Enterprises

Keyfactor^? and PrimeKey^? announced their intent to merge under the Keyfactor brand while committing to increased investments across all product lines.

Keyfactor is the pioneer of PKI as-a-Service, and the recognized leader in certificate lifecycle automation and crypto-agility solutions. PrimeKey?s EJBCA^? software offers the most powerful and flexible certificate authority (CA) supporting DevOps, IoT, manufacturing and enterprise use cases.

The merger forms an industry-first machine identity management platform, combining Keyfactor?s certificate lifecycle automation with PrimeKey?s EJBCA. The new platform will provide end-to-end machine identity management ? with flexible and highly scalable certificate issuance and automated deployment of machine identities across complex enterprise and emerging IoT and OT use cases.

?Now more than ever, enterprises must operate in a zero trust world, and machine identity management can no longer be ignored as part of an identity and access management (IAM) strategy,? explained Jordan Rackie, CEO at Keyfactor.

?Keyfactor?s 50% year-over-year growth is a testament to the industry?s imperative to secure every machine identity before it leads to loss of brand reputation, business outages or fines. The merger with PrimeKey amplifies the performance of the combined businesses across product offerings, distribution channels, expertise for our customers and large open source communities.?

Machine identity management was introduced by Gartner in its Hype Cycle for Identity and Access Management Technologies, 2020 report and recognized as a ?high? benefit in IAM. Even though machine identities, such as keys, certificates and secrets continue to outnumber human identities (e.g., usernames and passwords), they are often left out of an IAM strategy. Keyfactor customers recognize that cryptography is the critical infrastructure to ensure digital trust and help CISO?s achieve crypto-agility for their digital business.

?Our combined solutions now give customers unparalleled deployment choices including PKI as-a-Service, SaaS PKI (Azure, AWS, GCP), software appliance or FIPS 140-certified hardware,? explained Magnus Svenningson, CEO at PrimeKey.

?These flexible deployment options give our customers the control to operate a single pane of glass across all their machine identities in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Our EJBCA, SignServer and Bouncy Castle solutions are widely adopted by the developer community to integrate security in DevSecOps workflows and will remain open source as we continue to bring cutting-edge innovations to our enterprise customers.?

PrimeKey?s employees will join Keyfactor, creating an unprecedented mashup of talent in the identity management space. Jordan Rackie will continue leading the organization as CEO and Magnus Svenningson will assume the role of chief strategy officer (CSO) and executive vice president (EVP) of business development. The combined company will have a global presence with offices in the U.S., EMEA and Asia-Pacific. The transaction is expected to close within the next 90 days, pending approval by the Swedish authorities.

?The market is recognizing that securing machine identities is a fundamental pillar of a modern identity governance program,? said Thomas Krane, principal at Insight Partners.

?The IAM market is shifting its focus from human to machine identities, and this merger positions Keyfactor to stay on the leading edge of this evolution. Independently, Keyfactor and PrimeKey offer a forward-thinking approach to conventional IAM. Combined, the companies deliver a future-proof management solution for every machine identity.?

This $125 million growth infusion, led by Insight Partners, adds to its initial $77 million investment in Keyfactor in 2019.

Keyfactor is the leader in cloud-first PKI-as-a-Service and crypto-agility solutions. Its Crypto-Agility Platform? empowers security teams to seamlessly orchestrate every key and certificate across their entire enterprise.

PrimeKey is one of the world?s leading PKI and signing solutions providers and has developed several innovative products, including EJBCA Enterprise, SignServer Enterprise, PKI Appliance, PrimeKey SEE and Identity Authority Manager.