DigiCert Discloses 2021 State of PKI Automation Survey
DigiCert has published its 2021 State of PKI Automation survey that shows the typical enterprise in the Asia Pacific (APAC) now manages over 40,000 publicly and privately trusted PKI certificates.
Manually managing this volume of certificates can lead to costly outages if not handled correctly, as evidenced by the finding that two-thirds have experienced outages caused by certificates expiring unexpectedly.
“The volume of certificates has grown dramatically,” said Brian Trzupek, SVP of Product at DigiCert. “Further, validity periods for public TLS certificates have dropped from three years to one year since 2018. As a result, enterprises are finding it increasingly difficult to manually manage digital certificate workflows. They are looking for certificate automation, but need reassurance on how to do it and an understanding of the long-term costs and security benefits.”
“Manual processes aren’t an effective way to manage a large number of certificates. Something can always go wrong. Automating the management of PKI certificates is the obvious answer,” says Mike Mallos, Infrastructure Services Manager at Qantas. “It helps us improve security and compliance, become more agile and increase our productivity.”
More than one-third (35%) have experienced five to six such outages in the past six months alone, as compared to the 25% global average. Due to these issues and others, there is strong interest in adopting PKI automation.
Leading organizations are 10 times more likely to have already implemented automation. They’re meeting PKI SLAs and doing a better job at self-reporting deficiencies.
APAC is the region with more enterprises having trouble managing the workload, with 65% of the respondents stating that they are concerned about how much time is spent managing certificates.
They also lack visibility. 35% of enterprises use more than three departments to manage certificates, leading to confusion.
The typical enterprise says as many as 1,000 of the certificates are unmanaged, and nearly half (48%) say they frequently discover so-called “rogue” certificates (certificates that were implemented without IT’s knowledge or management), the highest occurrence among other regions surveyed.
Most enterprises are considering PKI automation, with 86% at least discussing it. Only 10% are at the stage where they are already implementing or maybe even finished implementing a solution. 12% say they are not discussing it and have no plans to do so. Most (70%) expect to implement a solution within 12 months.
