Business transformation drives demand for PKI and digital certificates

Thanks to organizational changes brought about by digital transformation, enterprise use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and digital certificates has never been higher, but the related skills to manage PKI are in historically short supply.

A new report from trusted identity company Entrust, based on research from the Ponemon Institute, finds cloud-based services remain the highest driver of PKI use at 51 percent, the Internet of Things (IoT) remains the second highest growing trend cited by 46 percent of respondents, and consumer mobile comes in third at 39 percent.

Topping the list of challenges holding back deployment and management of PKI is a lack of clear ownership, cited by 67 percent of respondents. Insufficient skills are rated as the second biggest challenge at 56 percent and lack of visibility of the applications that will depend on KPI was third at 47 percent. Similarly, the top challenges to enabling applications to use PKI are the existing PKI being incapable of supporting new applications (55 percent) and insufficient skills (46 percent).

"Over the years we have been doing this study, it is clear that the gap between the rising demand for PKI adoption and the challenges hindering it appear to be growing," says Dr Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. "This has the potential to exacerbate the headaches organizations already feel and create gaps in their security postures. When you factor in that environments are more distributed with remote working, cloud and IoT, it's clear that there's an immediate need for many organizations to gain additional visibility, automation and centralized control."

TLS/SSL certificates for public-facing websites and services are the most often cited use case for PKI credentials (81 percent of respondents). Private networks and VPN applications come in second (67 percent, up from 60 percent in 2020) and email security third (55 percent, up from 51 percent in 2020).

"PKI has never been in such high demand -- whether from the pressure of securing a remote or hybrid workforce this past year, or the continued growth of IoT and cloud-based services." says John Metzger, vice president of product marketing, digital security at Entrust. "At the same time, the skills and resources required to deploy and manage PKI continue to be in short supply -- an issue exacerbated by lack of clear organizational ownership over PKI deployments. To deal with this complexity, organizations need a strategy first and products second to support this transformation. This means that they need a partner like Entrust who not only has the technological capabilities, but the heritage and expertise to help succeed in this environment."

The full study is available from the Entrust site.

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