What is Public Key Infrastructure…

PKI is the creation, issuance, management, distribution, usage, storage, and revocation of digital certificates.

Overview

What it is:

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) consists of the services, processes and roles required for the creation, issuance, management, distribution, usage, storage, and revocation of digital certificates. These certificates enable authentication of the identities across various parts of the data transfer process, and can be used for the encryption of traffic between endpoints.

What it does:

Through the management of digital certificates, PKI ensures higher levels of security when deployed within organizations by validating the authenticity of resources and encrypting data.

Why it matters:

By using PKI, enterprises are able to make security decisions based on sound cryptographic fundamentals: it would be difficult, if not impossible to manage digital certificates (ad he cryptographic keys they represent) otherwise. Use of digital certificates ensures decisions made upstream with SaaS, PaaS and identities, applications, and encryption are sound and grounded.

What to do about it:

Enterprises that want to stay competitive should understand that reputation and trust are very difficult assets to earn back once they are lost. Correct use of a PKI can and should be applied to every digital identity across the enterprise including devices, apps, and people. However, management of keys in-house is onerous and unnecessary.

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