The 2020 PKI and IoT Trends Study by the Ponemon Institute is out! As always, the latest study provided interesting findings that reinforces PKI and IoT trends we are seeing at Entrust. This year saw a noteworthy trend in the number of certificates organizations are managing: For several years the number has been growing incrementally, but this year’s study, it saw an increase of 43%.
It’s worth noting that our survey was done before the workplace reality we’re experiencing due to the pandemic. That said, it’s reasonable to expect another jump next year as a direct result.
Average Number of Certificates Issued and Acquired
So, what does this mean and why does it matter?
- Digital certificates are proliferating at an accelerated rate.
- As an organization’s certificate environment continues to grow, their IT environment is likely becoming more distributed, which makes visibility and management more crucial.
- Digital certificate use is becoming more complex, including validity periods shrinking
- More certificates can mean more risk due to a widened attack surface.
Certificate issues can have severe consequences, including outages of critical systems causing business disruptions or risk of breaches. And all organizations are susceptible. Earlier this year, a major tech company saw its collaboration tool go down for three hours due to an expired certificate – a business disruption affecting some 32 million users.
But more than that, a certificate issue or outage can make an organization quite vulnerable – and that can be costly. An innovative AIR study conducted earlier this year evaluateds the cost of breaches worldwide to be in the ballpark of $51 B to $72 B (USD) annually. That’s a lot of money for something that could be prevented with the right tools in place.
The good news is that certificate management issues are highly preventable. That is why Entrust launched Certificate Hub – our lifecycle management tool for public and private certificates. It improves visibility into any issues and can act as either an enforcement point for centralization efforts, or a management layer across multiple Certificate Authorities (CAs).
With Certificate Hub, customers can
- Track and document certificates and their expirations, while linking them back to their owners
- Gain full visibility into the private and public certificates deployed across the organization from a single pane of glass
- Manage the lifecycle of certificates from a central enforcement point
- Easily integrate with existing applications, enabling certificate automation and full management of all certificates.
To learn more about Entrust’s certificate lifecycle management tools, visit https://www.entrust.com/digital-security/certificate-solutions/products/pki/certificate-hub
Read the 2020 PKI & IoT Trends Study at https://go.entrust.com/Global-PKI-and-IoT-Trends-Study
