Digital business is continuously evolving. From organizations moving their business to the cloud, to the need to support remote and hybrid workforces, to the rise in the number of machines (like devices and applications) – and one thing all these demand: strong security.

PKI is the cornerstone of IT security. This was very apparent and clearly stated in the latest Global PKI and IoT Trends Study conducted by Ponemon Institute: “Not only the number of applications dependent upon the PKI but the nature of them indicates that the PKI is a strategic part of the core IT backbone.”

But what else came out of that study, is organizations are facing some big challenges internally. When it comes to managing and deploying PKI, 71% of organizations cited “no clear ownership” as their top challenge for the 7th year in a row. No clear ownership is a challenge for multiple reasons: it suggests that as businesses evolve and their use cases expand, no one is overseeing the strategy, roll out and security these changes require. It also could mean that security within organizations is siloed. If organizations are siloed, this also likely means that there’s no centralized visibility into their environment and policies, which can leave them exposed or vulnerable should something go wrong – like a system outage for example. Insufficient skills and resources result in similar challenges.

In addition to no clear ownership, “lack of internal skills and resources” rounded out the top 3 challenges organizations are facing – also for the 7th year in a row. As it turns out, the study uncovered that only 41% of organizations actually have PKI specialist on staff. With so many things hooking into your PKI, and PKI being an enabler to these modern use cases, this is not something that should be overlooked

All this to say, PKI has never been in such high demand, while the skills shortage has never been worse – so organizations need help. And managed and as a service offerings might be just the answer they’re looking for.

Read the full 2021 Global PKI and IoT Trends Study.

Learn more about Entrust’s PKI-as-a-Service.