With the acceleration of digital transformation and hybrid work, the number of devices and machines accessing critical data and resources has increased exponentially. The growing number of devices accessing sensitive data gives rise to an expanded attack surface that leaves organizations vulnerable to cyberattacks that can cause financial and reputational damage.
The traditional network perimeter is no more. Identities – whether human or machine – have become the new line of defense when it comes to protecting against cyberattacks. To effectively manage your devices, you need complete visibility over all devices and machines in your organization. While digital certificates are an effective way to create and manage machine identities and device authentication to secure data and communication between a device and an organization’s critical resources (whether in the cloud or on-premises), managing the lifecycle of these digital certificates across disparate environments and a multitude of different devices is proving to be a challenge for many enterprise IT teams.
Managing Digital Certificates Across Devices and Operating Systems
Having a complete certificate lifecycle management (CLM) solution that enables automation is key to having control and ensuring compliance across your digital certificate estate. In addition, an effective PKI solution should support multiple protocols to support certificate enrollment across a number of devices (mobile, laptops, IoT, etc.) and operating systems to provide end-to-end CLM across a global enterprise.
Much like the remote/hybrid work option allows people to be flexible, a PKI solution must integrate with mobile device management (MDM) solutions to allow organizations to do the same, in turn supporting advanced identification, authentication, and authorization schemes, enabling organizations to deploy and manage MDM solutions effectively with strong machine identities. Microsoft Windows devices that account for a large number of workforce devices use the WS-Trust X.509v3 Token Enrollment Extensions Protocol (WSTEP), which allows for secure certificate enrollment and revocation capabilities.
Automation is a key requirement for CLM to ensure seamless certificate enrollment and revocation processes. Having a cloud-based PKI as a service that integrates with MDM solutions eliminates the costly overhead with on-premises infrastructure and ensures your organization is being actively managed and secured.
As digital transformation continues to accelerate, it’s up to you and your organization to continue to grow and evolve with the trends and reduce complexity for enterprise IT departments worldwide. Learn how Entrust PKI as a Service (PKIaaS) enables seamless integration with leading MDM vendors like Microsoft Intune, VMware Workspace ONE, Google Enterprise MDM via Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP), Ivanti, and Jamf Pro, so customers can deploy and provision digital certificates with ease.
