PKI for the Modern Enterprise
As pressure builds to provide an increasing number of services online, the demands on security have begun to play a significant role within companies of all sizes. Organizations need to maintain reliable and highly trusted networks not only to safeguard all business functions but also to be able to meet specific confidentiality and privacy regulations.
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) can meet the demand for authentication and encryption throughout the enterprise.
Did you know that Private PKI allows you to secure and manage devices and applications as diverse as: web servers, IoT devices, mobile devices, cloud/multi-cloud applications.
PKI is indeed gradually becoming an indispensible part of a modern enterprise. From that perspective, PKI consists of roles, security policies, communication protocols and procedures needed to generate, manage, distribute, and revoke digital certificates, while also managing public-key encryption to make secure and trusted communications between different entities both inside and outside an organization or business.
Therefore, PKI aims to aid in the secure electronic transfer of information for many networking tasks, from secure email to internet banking, or any activity in which passwords are deficient for authentication purposes, and to enable stricter and better verified proof of identity required to validate the information that is being transferred.
Cloud infrastructure is currently agile and secure and a new wave of highly reliable, cloud-based PKI offerings are now available for enterprises to use, known as PKI-as-a-Service (PKIaaS), which make it possible for IT departments to maintain control while all the complexity that comes with managing their PKI setup is contracted out to the service provider.
PKIaaS unites the necessary automation, infrastructure, control, billing, and distribution of certificates while also simplifying and centralizing client certificates’ management.
One more benefit of outsourcing PKI to the cloud is in having a centralized account. With a PKIaaS a company would be able to be vetted once, in contrast to each time that a certificate is issued, which is costly due to how time-consuming the vetting process is. This will make it possible for pre-vetted companies to be issued certificates from a single account while selected administrators have the authority to be able to issue any type of certificate on demand.
The use of a centralized account to control and manage all certificates also makes reporting and monitoring of the costs involved much easier.
For businesses that are considering deploying and managing client certificates internally, there are a few challenges to overcome: software licenses, operational capacity, maintenance costs, and the infrastructure required to support PKI.
An organization would need to build, maintain, update, and support everything themselves, and the employees must be trained and certified to keep up with the security compliance requirements. However, IT leaders insist that the ultimate effect from using PKI is worth giving the technology a try.