Digital certificates – both public and private – continue to proliferate. Organizations need to be more security conscious than ever, especially as the way we do business is evolving. Traditional PKI use cases – like SSL, VPN, and mobile – are still leading the pack, but it’s newer use cases like IoT and DevOps that are driving increased adoption. And trends like mobility, moving to the cloud, and short-lived certificates mean modern enterprise environments are getting more distributed and complex.

As a result, we’ve seen a resurgence of PKI and an overall increase in digital certificates. But with this increase in certificates comes the increasing need to properly manage them.

Global PKI and IoT trends study

In the 2019 Ponemon Institute Global PKI and IoT Trends Study, a few datapoints came out that suggest businesses are still struggling with proper certificate management. For starters, when asked what the main challenges were in deploying and managing PKI, the number one response was “no clear ownership”.

This is a problem. And as the study states, “this is a significant departure from known best practices that require direct lines of responsibility for all PKI-dependent applications.” Speaking of applications, the report also asked the respondents how many distinct applications are managed by their PKI. The answer: “an average of eight distinct applications, such as email and network authentication, are supported by an organization’s PKI.”

Based on the number of applications that depend on PKI, and how critical these applications are to a business, it’s clear that PKI is a strategic part of the core IT backbone. But wait … no clear ownership was the #1 challenge?

Something needs to be done

Businesses need to ensure they have proper certificate management in place, giving them a view into the digital certificates deployed across their organization. And specifically:

  • Find out what certificates they have, and where are they deployed
  • Control and manage their certificates from a single enforcement point

Certificate Hub can help

In an effort to help customers address these issues, Entrust Datacard created its newest offering in the Certificate Solutions product portfolio: Certificate Hub. First, Certificate Hub Discovery will find all the deployed certificates across your organization and tie them to an issuer, so you can spot policy violations, identify rogue certificates, and verify the deployment of managed certificates. It helps you hold others accountable by tracking certificates to owners, and ensuring they get notified of any upcoming actions they need to take. And when it comes to control, Certificate Hub acts as an enforcement point to centrally manage policy, issuance, and certificate access all your certificate lifecycle management activities from a single pane of glass.

No more unmanaged certificates putting your business at risk. With proper certificate management, you help increase security and reduce outages, while IT and CISOs can rest assured knowing they have central oversight over their certificate environment.

Learn more on the Entrust Datacard Certificate Hub webpage, and let us know if you would like us to show you more.

You can also read the full Ponemon Institute Report.