Why Organizations Need PKI-as-a-Service

The 91-minute digital certificate outage caused the Bank of England’s Real Time Gross Settlement System to halt transactions worth $6 trillion, and here we are still wondering whether automating CA-agnostic certificate management is necessary to maintain digital trust. 
You have likely interacted with PKI without even realizing it- whether logging into your online banking app, accessing secure Government portals, or sending a secure email. So, what exactly is PKI? At its core, PKI is the backbone of digital certificates and enables public key cryptography, which powers secure authentication and encryption for users, machines, and applications.   

With more IoT devices swooping in the market- over 15 billion expected this year alone, PKI is becoming even more critical in securing these devices. Managing PKI using traditional methods is becoming a complex task. That’s where PKI as a Service comes into play! 

Why is it time to re-think PKIaaS as a better choice for your organization?

PKIaaS offers a cost-saving, scalable, and time-efficient solution to PKI management. Think of it as outsourcing the heavy lifting of your PKI infrastructure, allowing you to focus on your core operations without worrying about the intricate details of managing certificates and keys manually. Please find more information about the difference between traditional PKI and PKI-as-a-Service in this blog. 

Deploying and managing in-house PKI seems like a reliable solution, but it often requires extensive resources and expertise.  You are dealing with multiple Certificate Authorities, complex configurations, and the need for constant monitoring. Many organizations find that handling all of this internally can be a bit overwhelming. 

That is where PKI-as-a-Service brings a change as it involves deploying and managing an organization’s Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) on a cloud-based platform, ensuring your PKI setup is secure and continuously up-to-date. This service handles the entire PKI lifecycle, from setting up a Certificate Authority (CA) to issuing, managing, and revoking end-entity certificates for user’s devices or domains.  

The major drivers behind the growth of PKIaaS in the global market 

The outage at RTGS is not the first time. A previous 39-minute RTGS outage in January 2024 was caused by a certificate authority issue vaguely tied to AWS certificate authority changes, and most importantly, with the upcoming changes to TLS certificate validity, reducing it from 398 days to 90 days, will quadruple the workload for organizations using manual certificate management, increasing the risk of future breaches and outages. 

In the below-mentioned points, let’s understand why PKIaaS is considered a more efficient choice for your organization 

1. Follow PKI best practices

   Every PKI deployment starts with a Certification Policy (CP) and Certification Practice Statements (CPS) customized to handle your organization’s security requirements. This means you get the PKI from scratch without the hassle of actually building it in your on-premises environment. It ensures and automates the certificate enrollment and issuance process along with the supported protocols, such as ACME, SCEP, and WSTEP.

2. Ease of deployment

   Setting up a dedicated offline root in a highly secure environment ensures your organization’s security foundation is rock solid from day one. Once your PKI is built, we move to the deployment phase, and not just in any way, but with high availability and HSM-backed issuing CAs running in a single-tenant cloud instance. So, you’re not sharing resources with anyone else- it’s all dedicated to your organization. You get the security of the cloud but without the noise of shared infrastructure.

3. 24/7 Maintenance

   From managing Certificate Authorities (CAs), Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs), firewalls, to patching- maintaining a PKI is a lot to handle. But with the cloud-based platform of PKIaaS it becomes easy to maintain with regular alerts and up-to-date notifications, allowing your IT teams to focus on more strategic work, like driving business value instead of managing PKI around the clock.

4. Centralized control

   Your teams will be able to issue, deploy, and manage certificates using a single, easy-to-use UI. No need for complex setups or tons of technical knowledge. Whether it’s issuing certificates for users, machines, or applications, you have everything you need in one place. You’re empowered to manage your PKI without the hassle of dealing with the background details.

5. Strict data protection regulations

   In March 2024, American Express card data was exposed to a third-party data breach. Although not affecting American Express’ internal systems, the breach may have compromised certain cardholders’ details, such as card numbers, names, and expiration dates. This underlines the importance of regulatory compliance, such as NIST, FIPS, GDPR, etc, which demands strong authentication and encryption, simplified by PKIaaS by providing secure, managed PKI solutions that adapt to these ever-changing regulations.

How does PKI-as-a-Service help with Zero Trust? 

The key behind the zero trust strategies is the ability to automate certificate management. Think about the number of devices, applications, and users that constantly interact within your environment. Many of these devices are ephemeral- like containers in DevOps workflows, which might only exist for minutes or hours. The complexity only increases with certificates coming from multiple sources owned by different teams. 

With PKIaaS, you get automated deployment, discovery, management, and renewal of certificates. No more manually tracking down certificates across the enterprise or worrying about expirations slipping through the cracks. Everything is streamlined and centralized. 

So, let’s consider a scenario where you have certificates for SSL/TLS, S/MIME, Code Signing, IoT devices, each with its own unique lifecycle, issued by different CAs. Trying to handle that manually can be cumbersome. But PKIaaS takes care of it all in the background. Whether you’re using ACME, SCEP, or custom APIs, PKIaaS integrates seamlessly into your existing tools and workflows, like DevOps pipelines or your IoT deployments. 

1. Deployment

   Certificates need to be deployed instantly and automatically, particularly for DevOps teams using CI/CD pipelines with tools like Jenkins, Chef, and Ansible. PKIaaS allows you to integrate directly with these tools so certificates can be deployed, managed, and updated without human intervention.

   And it’s not just about convenience. As cryptography evolves, maintaining crypto-agility is crucial. Take quantum computing, for example. Right now, quantum computers aren’t powerful enough to break 2048-bit RSA encryption, but they’re getting closer. Between 2019 and 2022, the estimated number of qubits required to break RSA encryption fell dramatically from 1 billion to just 20 million. So, the need to quickly migrate your environment to new cryptographic standards in the future is very real.

2. Discovery

   One of the biggest challenges that organizations face is the discovery of existing certificates. Most organizations aren’t starting from scratch, and they already have a lot of certificates spread across the environment. The problem is that many of these are outside the IT team’s control, especially with developer teams scattered throughout the business.

   PKIaaS solves this by automating discovery. It can find all the certificates across your environment, assess them for things like key length and expiration dates, and bring them under a centralized management platform. This makes it easy for your IT team to ensure compliance, improve security, and replace any certificates that don’t meet corporate standards.

3. Renewal

   With new updates and improved security standards, certificates might only last days or weeks. Manually renewing certificates in such a short cycle can lead to human error. You might remember a recent incident where a collaboration platform went down simply because an admin forgot to renew a certificate, resulting in a major outage.

   PKIaaS offers automated renewal processes. It assesses whether the certificate is still valid, ensuring it’s being used appropriately before renewing. This minimizes the risk of renewing certificates that aren’t needed and ensures service isn’t disrupted.

4. Management

   The ultimate goal here is centralized governance. A modern PKIaaS solution offers a single pane of glass where all your certificates, whether for websites, devices, or code signing, are managed centrally.

   Additionally, it integrates with different CAs, whether internal or external, giving you the option to issue certificates based on your specific use cases. For example, while many organizations use Microsoft as a CA for their Windows devices, that’s just one piece of the puzzle. A modern PKIaaS can manage those certificates alongside certificates from other CAs, all under one roof.

The S in PKIaaS also stands for: 

These four core features really highlight why PKIaaS is the future of certificate management: Scale, Speed, Simplicity, and Security. Let’s break these down one by one. 

1. Scalability

   It’s a highly efficient cloud-based system that can scale to meet your needs with nearly limitless capacity. Whether you’re managing thousands or millions of certificates, PKIaaS grows with your organization, and the best part is utilizing the cloud infrastructure. The service automatically adjusts to your certificate requirements as your organization grows or fluctuates.

2. Speed

   Let’s consider spinning up a new set of certificates for a critical business function in minutes. That’s what PKIaaS allows you to do. It deploys and expands rapidly, meaning you can respond to new security requirements.

   In the past, setting up a new PKI infrastructure might have taken weeks or even months. But with PKIaaS, you are looking at minutes to scale your security in line with business operations. Whether you’re expanding into new regions, launching new products, or onboarding new teams, PKIaaS makes sure your security posture keeps up with the speed of business.

3. Simplicity

   The complexity of managing certificates can become a major challenge. Within your organization different teams might be deploying certificates in different environments, using different tools, and at different times, which also leads to management complexities. With PKIaaS, your organization does not have to stress over the day-to-day operations or troubleshooting issues. It’s simple to deploy and adaptable to various environments, whether you’re running on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model.

4. Security

   PKIaaS provides the highest levels of assurance, giving you dedicated Certificate Authorities (CAs), meaning your cryptographic keys are protected to the highest standards. So, whether you’re issuing certificates for IoT devices, managing user authentication, or encrypting sensitive communications, you can ensure that the keys are secure and well-protected.

How PKIaaS can be deployed in your environment? 

For ease of deployment in your organization’s environment, the PKIaaS solution can be deployed on various platforms: 

• On-Prem PKI: Managed PKI to be deployed within your organization infrastructure, which means that PKI components such as root and issuing Certificate Authorities (CAs) are hosted within an on-premises platform. 
• SaaS PKI: The PKI setup for certificate lifecycle management to be configured in your organization’s cloud-based platform, enhancing security and establishing digital identities for the users. 
• PKIaaS: Automated certificate lifecycle management and custom Managed-PKI to be hosted and managed by Encryption Consulting’s cloud environment with the flexibility of customizing the PKI based on your domain and security requirements. 

How can Encryption Consulting help? 

Encryption Consulting provides specialized services to identify vulnerabilities and mitigate risks by providing PKI Services. Our strategic guidance aligns PKI solutions with organizational objectives, enhancing efficiency and minimizing costs. By partnering with Encryption Consulting, organizations can unlock the full potential of PKI solutions, realizing tangible financial benefits while maintaining strong security measures.

Encryption Consulting’s PKIaaS provides a flexible and secure PKI solution customized to your specific needs, offering benefits such as customizable options, high assurance standards, and a low-risk managed approach. PKIaaS automates key and certificate management tasks, reducing operational overhead and minimizing the risk of human error. Additionally, it enhances network visibility by requiring certificates for access. It will take care of building the PKI infrastructure to lead and manage the PKI environment (cloud/ hybrid or On-Prem) of your organization.

Encryption Consulting’s certificate lifecycle management solution- CertSecure Manager has a comprehensive suite of lifecycle management features, from discovery and inventory to issuance, deployment, renewal, revocation, and reporting. CertSecure provides an all-encompassing solution. Intelligent report generation, alerting, automation, automatic deployment onto servers, and certificate enrollment add layers of sophistication, making it a versatile and intelligent asset.

Conclusion

PKIaaS delivers a consolidated, automated approach to PKI, which is critical for Zero Trust environments. It handles everything from deployment, discovery, renewal, and management, ensuring your organization stays secure, compliant, and agile in a world where certificate management can easily become overwhelming. 

So, why should organizations embrace PKIaaS? It’s about flexibility, scalability, and, most importantly, automation. This lets your teams focus on innovation while the complexity of PKI management is taken care of.