cloud technology

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.

PKI and digital certificates underpin secure communication across modern networks, enabling authentication, encryption and data integrity for users, devices and applications. This blog explains the foundational concepts behind PKI, starting with public key cryptography, which uses paired public and private keys to encrypt and decrypt information. PKI builds on this by defining the policies, technologies and processes needed to issue, manage and validate digital certificates through trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs). These certificates bind identities to public keys and are used across applications such as secure email, eCommerce and online banking. The article also clarifies key PKI terminology, including Certificate Authorities, digital certificates, qualified certificates, advanced electronic signatures and qualified electronic signatures under eIDAS. It outlines industry bodies like the CA/Browser Forum, and certificate types such as EV certificates, wildcard certificates and SAN certificates—each serving different identity assurance and domain coverage needs. With PKI’s growing role in securing digital ecosystems, organizations must understand these components to ensure strong, scalable and compliant security practices.

As organizations adopt hybrid cloud environments and face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) remains a critical tool for securing users, devices, applications and machine-to-machine communications. However, deploying and managing PKI internally can be complex, requiring specialized expertise, ongoing maintenance and significant investment to keep pace with evolving security and compliance requirements. These challenges are driving organizations toward managed PKI-as-a-Service (PKIaaS) solutions that simplify operations while maintaining strong security and control. Cloud-based PKIaaS enables organizations to outsource the complexity of certificate management while gaining scalability, operational efficiency and compliance support. Benefits include automated certificate lifecycle management, centralized visibility, flexible deployment options, integration with enterprise tools and the ability to quickly expand security services without additional infrastructure investments. By leveraging managed PKI services, organizations can improve security, reduce operational burdens and support modern hybrid environments with a scalable, cost-effective foundation for digital trust.

The industry continues to shorten TLS/SSL certificate lifespans to strengthen security by reducing the exposure window if keys are compromised. Following this trend, Apple announced that starting September 1, 2020, TLS server certificates will be limited to a maximum validity of 398 days, and other major browsers are expected to follow. Existing two‑year certificates issued before that date remain valid, but all new certificates must comply with the one‑year limit. Public CAs, including HID IdenTrust, are updating issuance policies accordingly and will no longer provide two‑year certificates after mid‑August 2020. Organizations still relying on longer‑lived certificates must plan for accelerated renewal cycles to maintain compliance and avoid service disruptions. HID encourages customers to secure remaining two‑year certificates before the deadline and use updated tools for streamlined certificate management.

Digital certificates are becoming more difficult to manage as two major trends accelerate: certificate lifespans are getting significantly shorter, and the number of IoT devices requiring certificates is exploding. Some applications now require certificates as short-lived as 30 days, creating enormous operational pressure on IT teams already responsible for managing thousands of certificates across expanding device fleets. Expired certificates pose serious risks—including outages, security gaps and reputational damage—yet most organizations still rely on manual processes and spreadsheets that cannot scale. To keep pace, organizations need automated certificate lifecycle management. A centralized certificate management platform streamlines enrollment, renewal, revocation and monitoring across both public and private certificates. HID’s HydrantID Account Certificate Manager (ACM) helps eliminate manual tracking and reduces human error by automating certificate issuance through standards-based protocols like ACMEv2, SCEP, EST and Microsoft auto-enrollment. With a single portal for visibility and control, enterprises can support rapid IoT growth, maintain security and avoid costly certificate‑related outages.

TLS/SSL certificates are essential for securing communications between browsers and web servers, protecting sensitive information through encryption and identity verification. These certificates use public and private key cryptography to establish trusted, encrypted connections and come in varying assurance levels, including Domain Validation (DV), Organization Validation (OV) and Extended Validation (EV). While DV certificates only verify domain ownership, OV and EV certificates provide higher levels of organizational identity validation, making them more suitable for business and customer-facing applications. As certificate lifespans continue to shorten, managing renewals and maintaining compliance has become increasingly challenging for enterprises. Organizations must not only select the appropriate certificate type based on their security and business requirements, but also implement certificate lifecycle management processes to automate issuance, renewal and monitoring. Effective certificate management helps reduce operational overhead, prevent outages caused by expired certificates and maintain trust across websites and digital services.