An enterprise certificate authority (CA) is a vital element of the modern IT ecosystem. It provides the security foundation for all your users, devices, and applications. You can establish who’s trusted, authenticate their validity, and communicate securely using encryption.
As we discussed in a recent Tech Talk, How to Unify Certificate Management On All Your Devices and Applications, enterprises face increasingly difficult challenges to manage enterprise CAs. These challenges include labor-intensive manual processes, shorter certificate lifetimes and lurking threats such as quantum computing. These challenges become magnified and more daunting at scale as enterprise CAs grow to support thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions or certificates.
Together, we have devised a solution to help organizations tackle these challenges and come out on top. Here are five key takeaways from our session:
- For an enterprise CA to provide a rock-solid infrastructure that can respond quickly to threats, automation is a must, particularly at scale.
- Microsoft’s extremely popular Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) provides CA automation but lacks automated support for many popular platforms including Linux, Mac, and UNIX, as well as for many enterprise applications.
- A tamper-resistant hardware security module (HSM) protects sensitive date in transit, in use, and at rest and is ideal for storing and managing the encryption keys used in an enterprise CA. The Futurex KMES Series 3 — a unique HSM dedicated to key management — offers a turnkey security architecture and virtually limitless scalability of CAs.
- CertAccord Enterprise software from Revocent provides a certificate management bridge that enables disenfranchised platforms and applications, bringing full automation to the enterprise CA and ADCS environments.
- A unified certificate management solution from Revocent and Futurex (shown below) delivers end-to-end security, lifecycle automation, rapid time to market, lower TCO and compliance scope, and cost reduction.
If you weren’t able to attend the Tech Talk live, we encourage you to head over and watch the replay. Now is the time to ensure your organization has the safe, secure, and nimble enterprise CA to handle today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.
Adam Cason is Vice President, Global and Strategic Alliances at Futurex. Mike Cooper is Founder and CEO of Revocent.