Almost two years into the pandemic, organizations continue to embrace a hybrid workforce and more and more transactions are being done electronically – a temporary permanent that will certainly not be going away even in a post-pandemic world. Let’s not forget the Cloud adoption and Internet of Things (IoT) trends we’re seen in recent years. With all that, organizations are at even greater risk of falling victim to cyberattacks due to a widened attack surface.

The number of certificates organizations are using is growing exponentially to address the growing risks and threats, as well as to comply with government and industry security regulations. But keeping track of high volumes of certificates can be a nightmare. To this day, some organizations continue to use self-signed certificates for their high-volume requirements. One of the risks of using self-signed certificates is the lack of visibility over them. And that can lead to outages due to an expired certificate. A system using an expired certificate makes an organization vulnerable to attacks. This can be catastrophic and can result in revenue loss, customer confidence loss, and in the event of a data breach, a hefty fine and even prison time.

Enter Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). With a PKI solution in place, security teams will have full visibility of the organization’s certificates. A centralized self-service platform will be used to create and monitor certificates, allowing security teams to keep track of certificates easily. Plus, PKI supports just about any use case, be it a traditional or an emerging use case such as enterprise user authentication, device authentication, server authentication, document signing, file encryption, internal sites, and services security, virtual private network (VPN) authentication, email security, private cloud-based authentication, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), e-commerce and Internet of Things (IoT).

Some might ask, why not just use certificates from a public Certificate Authority (CA)? From a commercial standpoint, adopting Public Key Infrastructure for high volumes of certificates is a better option than using publicly trusted certificates, as long as public trust is not required.

Organizations with high volumes of certificates should get rid of self-signed certificates and adopt PKI. PKI does not only give security teams visibility of their certificates, but it also gives them control over their certificates by allowing them to set policies for issuing certificates, which are tailored to their organization’s requirements.

Information about our PKI solution can be found here.