best practices

As organizations rely more heavily on encrypted communications and certificate-based security, effective PKI management has become a critical component of cybersecurity. While PKI provides strong encryption and identity assurance, poor certificate management can undermine its effectiveness and create significant security risks. Common challenges include self-issued certificates that lack centralized oversight, infrequent certificate rotation and manual processes that cannot scale with growing certificate volumes. These issues often stem from human error, insufficient planning and limited visibility into certificate inventories. To strengthen PKI security, organizations should focus on proven best practices such as designing certificate architectures carefully, maintaining comprehensive certificate inventories, protecting root and issuing keys with secure storage mechanisms, automating certificate lifecycle management and regularly rotating certificates and cryptographic keys. Automated PKI management solutions help reduce operational burdens, minimize human error and improve scalability while ensuring consistent adherence to security standards. By combining strong governance with automation, organizations can improve data protection, reduce risk and maintain a reliable certificate infrastructure.

Enterprises are accelerating PKI automation as expanding cloud adoption, IoT growth, remote work and rapid environment creation increase the number of devices and applications requiring certificates. Manual certificate processes cannot keep pace with shortening certificate lifespans and rising operational risk, making automation essential for maintaining Zero Trust security. Automated certificate provisioning and validation enable continuous authentication of every user and device, supporting passwordless models and reducing outages caused by expired certificates. Among automation approaches, the connector model provides a platform‑ and vendor‑agnostic solution by leveraging open-source utilities and existing enterprise tools to deploy and manage certificates without proprietary agents. This decentralized architecture avoids single points of failure and can be easily reconfigured for different certificate providers. HID PKIaaS uses the connector model to deliver scalable automation, global resilience, simple subscription pricing, expert support and fewer operational burdens. By future‑proofing certificate issuance and lifecycle management, organizations can strengthen security while reducing complexity and IT workload.

PKI remains a foundational technology for passwordless authentication, data protection and securing users, devices and applications. But as attack surfaces expand and IT teams face increased workload, in‑house PKI has become difficult and costly to maintain. Organizations report stretched staff, growing complexity and rising security demands—conditions that make traditional PKI models harder to scale and keep compliant. Managing PKI internally requires significant upfront investment, ongoing maintenance, specialized expertise and rapid updates to address evolving threats. These pressures are accelerating the shift toward cloud-based PKI-as-a-Service (PKIaaS). When evaluating on‑prem PKI versus PKIaaS, organizations should assess operational efficiency, compliance needs and architectural agility. Cloud PKI delivers fast certificate issuance, supports multiple certificate types, controls costs and integrates easily with modern development and identity workflows. PKIaaS also simplifies compliance by enforcing strong policies, enabling Zero Trust principles and staying continuously updated with best practices. Architecturally, it provides scalable, interoperable infrastructure that adapts to new use cases without burdening IT. HID’s PKIaaS embodies this model through a subscription-based service that removes operational barriers and enables real-time certificate issuance and encryption capabilities for organizations of all sizes.

The rapid adoption of Chromebooks for remote work and distance learning has elevated the need for strong, scalable device security. Because Chromebooks rely heavily on network connectivity, certificate-based authentication through Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) offers an effective way to secure access to wireless and enterprise networks while enabling passwordless authentication. Digital certificates stored in a device’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provide a trusted identity for each Chromebook, reducing reliance on passwords and strengthening Zero Trust security models. While Google’s native certificate enrollment capabilities are designed for environments using Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), many organizations require a more flexible approach. HID’s PKI-as-a-Service (PKIaaS) extends automated certificate provisioning and lifecycle management to Chromebook deployments regardless of whether AD CS is present. By combining cloud-based PKI, identity federation and automated certificate enrollment, organizations can simplify Chromebook management, improve security and scale certificate-based authentication across educational and enterprise environments.

The SolarWinds attack underscored a key lesson for modern cybersecurity: organizations can no longer rely solely on perimeter defenses to protect critical systems. As attackers increasingly bypass traditional network boundaries, Zero Trust strategies require enterprises to authenticate every user, device, application and service before granting access. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) plays a foundational role in this approach by providing trusted digital identities, certificate-based authentication and encrypted communications across the enterprise. Rather than assuming trust based on network location, organizations must continuously verify identities and permissions for all interactions. A successful Zero Trust PKI strategy depends on several core principles: leveraging scalable cloud-based architectures, automating certificate lifecycle management, enforcing policy-driven controls, maintaining crypto-agility to respond to evolving threats and segmenting users and devices based on risk profiles. These capabilities help organizations reduce security gaps, improve resilience and adapt to changing cybersecurity requirements. By combining PKI with automation and strong governance, enterprises can establish a trusted foundation for authenticating everything in their environment while supporting modern cloud and hybrid infrastructure.

Remote work has dramatically expanded enterprise attack surfaces, forcing security teams to rethink how they protect networks, endpoints and applications outside traditional perimeters. Organizations are now dealing with more devices, more integrations and more vulnerabilities—all of which require fast, scalable security controls. Public Key Infrastructure as a Service (PKIaaS) provides this agility by delivering cloud-managed certificate issuance and lifecycle management without the operational overhead of maintaining in‑house PKI. Survey data shows that most cybersecurity professionals expect long-term, pandemic-driven changes to security strategy, with remote work placing sustained pressure on access, patching and authentication practices. To adapt, enterprises need modern PKI capabilities that automate certificate provisioning, support Zero Trust, secure virtual desktop environments and authenticate remote employees across diverse devices. HID PKIaaS offers managed certificate services that enable secure authentication, encrypted communications and automated certificate lifecycle management through integrations like Microsoft Intune, VMWare AirWatch, Microsoft Autoenrollment and standards-based protocols such as SCEP, EST and ACME. Organizations can choose simple issuing CA services or fully customized private root PKI deployments, reducing cost and complexity while improving the security baseline. Teams should assess their remote‑work security gaps, prioritize certificate‑based authentication and encryption across devices and applications and adopt PKIaaS to scale Zero Trust protections across hybrid, mobile and IoT environments.