Does your PKI do what you need it to do? What do you use it for? If you needed to scale up today, would you be able to?
You'd be surprised how often a sudden business need or use case pops up, and an organization finds out that they're not prepared to scale. And neither is their certificate authority (CA).
When we talk to our customers about their PKI, some of the first questions we ask are: What are your primary certificate use cases? What's driving your current change to your certificate environment? How comfortable are you that your current security solutions are able to adapt and support those changes? It's not surprising to us that in the 2019 Ponemon PKI & IoT Trends Study, the #1 challenge to enabling applications to use PKI is that the existing PKI is incapable of supporting new applications.
Several trends around security and digital certificates have resulted in more demands on CAs, including:
- DevOps and IoT requiring horizontal scaling of an increasing number of devices, things, and applications
- Increased use of certificates to secure identities
- Shorter lifetime certificates, meaning more frequent issuance
A recent Gartner blog states quite simply that "Shorter life cycles will put more pressure on your ability to manage the people, processes and technology that relate to your PKI, and certificate management approach."
As you might guess, we've been following these trends for a while and have continued to innovate and respond accordingly. With our latest release of Entrust Datacard Security Manager, we created a next-gen PKI platform tailored to meet the demanding needs of encryption everywhere. It provides a comprehensive backbone to all organizations looking to establish a scalable security practice.
Security Manager is able to meet the specific demands listed above through:
- Horizontal scaling: Ensuring the same level of security you'd expect from your PKI is not compromised by the significant number of devices, things, or applications that require certificates through DevOps or IoT use cases
- Increased throughput: Ensuring that certificate issuance is a non-issue – for both volume and rate – in use cases such as DevOps where short lifetime certificates are prevalent
Related materials:
Brochure: Entrust Datacard Security Manager
Tip Sheet: What to Look for in a PKI Vendor
