It’s hard to believe, but the second quarter of 2019 is already in the books, and the last three months have been eventful, to say the least. Now is a good time to look back on our recent history and summarize the events that unfolded during Q2. We’ll also look ahead to what Q3 will bring in the world of Remme.
Protocol
Tech is in our blood, and naturally the last three months has seen plenty of movement on that front. The big news, of course, is that REMChain is moving to EOSIO. This came about after a period of deep contemplation and a forensic investigation of various blockchain options. It was eventually decided that the EOSIO codebase was the perfect fit for Remme, not least due to its strong reputation in the industry and also its ability to process thousands of transactions every second. The fact that EOS and other tokens issued on the eponymous blockchain have over $6 billion dollars in market cap speaks to its status, while the various features of EOSIO mean it’s refreshingly easy to build, deploy and run apps on top of.
Although Hyperledger Sawtooth proved to be a great initial blockchain framework, the challenges proved insurmountable, such as Lightning Memory-Mapped Database, Command Line Interface, and custom ZeroMQ implementation of Sawtooth. What’s more, Sawtooth did not have a solution for efficiently hosting the full blockchain history and helpfully serving it to clients.
Despite every challenge being met head-on along the way, eventually we decided that the best course of action was to explore alternative blockchain options. In stepped EOSIO, and we’re confident that we made the right move. The EOSIO components have been tested and stabilized on their mainnet for almost a year and, unlike Sawtooth, it provides various tools including block explorers, client libraries and mobile frameworks for developers. We are excited by what the future holds as we move to a faster, more scalable ecosystem.
In conjunction with the changes in blockchain there also will be a few updates in consensus and governance. To help you learn about them, we’ve prepared a technical paper explaining all the changes in detail. In removing the hassle of resource management and streamlining the user experience, we’re confident that REMChain will become an intuitive go-to resource for newcomers who are not au fait with blockchain technology.
Keyhub
Meanwhile, back in May, Keyhub 1.0 was released. This was the culmination of an intensive development process, and a fervent desire to help SecOps and NetOps experts to manage SSL/TLS certificates with ease. Keyhub beta achieved our expectations and more, permitting swift discovery of external certificates behind a slick, user-friendly dashboard to provide an overview of system health at a glance.
One of the main advantages of Keyhub is in terms of SSL/TLS certificate management. Organizations who elect to automate such certificates soon appreciate that they save labor and better control certificate costs by doing so. Perhaps most importantly, they also reduce the risks associated with certificate problems. The launch of Keybub will enable scanning the internal environment of a company with the help of a software agent, which sources certificates, copies their main attributes, metadata and source to a cloud site, and tracks them so they can be easily renewed.
Company news
As a company, Remme has been as active as ever this quarter. Last month we ventured out to Interop Tokyo, an annual event for information technology focused on cloud, data centers, virtualization, security, and wireless.
The month prior, we finalized a partnership with customer identity management company Ubisecure. The arrangement will enable both parties to collaborate to create identity solutions using blockchain technology. We look forward to collaborating with Ubisecure to help solve the identity management and security challenges faced by enterprises.
Good to read
While our Keyhub tech team was working hard to create an awesome product, our marketing team was diligently gathering industry insights, all of which can be found in our whitepaper. In it, we take a deep dive into the topic of SSL/TLS certificates, covering key uses, effective ways of managing them, challenges on the horizon and tips for automating the flow. The paper is brimming with research insights and tips for building a robust PKI and protecting your networks. As with everything we do, we have sought to provide genuine value in this document.
Two more good reads we’d encourage you to check out, these ones mercifully more concise than our whitepaper:
- Сertificate lifecycle management with Remme Keyhub, which includes a full platform walkthrough;
- Why Manual Management of SSL/TLS Certs Destroys Security, a broader industry piece that outlines some of the problems we’re solving with Keyhub and Remme Protocol.
On to Q3!
Hopefully this summary of our activities in Q2 has got your heart racing for Q3. Okay, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but it describes our attitude to a tee. There’s plenty more to come, so we are ready to share our plans. For REMChain our focus is now very much on launching the testnet, and on making Q3 every bit as successful as Q2, building upon the existing features that are at the heart of Remme Protocol.
For Keyhub we plan to release new features: integrations with different systems (Slack, messengers, ITSM), API, new sources to find certs, CT log monitoring.
Stay tuned to know more about our progress! We’ll see you in three months for another forensic update.