Uses of PKI for Big Organizations and How to Ensure Your Company is Secure
The security of your digital data is now at the forefront of any user’s concern. To prevent data theft, it’s critical to encrypt it so that only those with permission to change it may see it. Public-key cryptography is perhaps the most extensively used type of cryptography. The public key infrastructure, or PKI, is a collection of technical solutions based on this concept.
The PKI’s job is to create digital certificates. These are used to perform cryptographic operations like encryption and digital signatures. These activities are employed to provide secrecy, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation.
How is PKI Useful for Large Companies?
Digital Signature
Regular signatures are also risky due to the coronavirus pandemic. The signing and approval of critical papers can be sped up by using digital signature technology.
If you want to employ digital signing in your company, be sure the signature is legitimate, the document hasn’t been tampered with, and no one can see it without your consent. That’s a job for a digital certificate, as well as the PKI that enables it.
To make things easier for your company, consider using a document signing technology that enables users to:
- Verify the sender’s identity and the document’s authorship
- Maintain data/content consistency
- At a large scale, manage certifications and signings.
Email conversations that are encrypted and authenticated
One of the most widely used modes of communication is email. However, for some businesses, it might be a significant data security issue. In fact, email phishing is involved in 22% of all enterprise breaches.
PKI can provide an additional layer of reliable, impenetrable security and authentication. The federal government of the United States, for example, uses a Federal PKI to authenticate users, confirm authorship, and protect emails as they travel between national and international organizations.
Here are some helpful hints for implementing email encryption and digital signature within your organization:
- Adopt a business policy for email signatures (email certificates).
- Organize your email certificate maintenance and deployment into a single, integrated portal (this saves time and ensures that nothing goes wrong!)
- Wherever feasible, use pre-configured email certificates.
- Adopt a PKI deployment tool that automates the process.
Authentication with a smart card
Chip-based security systems are becoming increasingly used in both B2B and B2C enterprises. The healthcare industry is one such industry that will profit from technological advancements.
In 2019, the healthcare business in the United States reported 510 data breaches, all of which involved 500 or more records. This equates to about 1.4 breaches every day.
With so much sensitive data passing through hospitals on a regular basis, it’s critical that the healthcare industry abandons hackable passwords in favor of a more secure system. Smart cards are helpful in this situation. These smart cards have the following capabilities:
- Reduce data breaches and fraud by putting authentication.
- Data access in the hands of your staff.
- Better data capture.
How can you secure your organization?
There are many reasons to embrace PKI and enable improved, automated certificate administration in your business, from digital signatures to data encryption, user, device, client authentication, and smart card authentication.Keeping track of a PKI estate with thousands or even millions of certificates to maintain can be difficult, primarily if manual processes are used. A single forgotten certificate that expires might bring your web services to a halt or expose your company to a data leak or hack.
Of course, the solution is to delegate the majority of the labor to technology. Your company can do the following using an enterprise-grade PKI management platform:
- Get a better understanding of your certificate environment.
- Maintain control over your certificates by managing them.
- As much of your PKI as feasible should be automated.
- New users are being enrolled 72 percent faster.
- Ensure that all of your data and communications are secure.
- Continually authenticate each user.
- With end-to-end encryption, you can limit the chances of a data breach or fraud.
- Your whole PKI operations can deploy in any environment, including cloud, hosted, on-premises, hybrid, and in-country.
