How to Mitigate Risk with a Private CA

To the great delight of cybercriminals, many organizations continue to rely upon outdated, weak security protocols such as passwords. However, an increasing number of organizations have progressed to the strongest, most secure, easiest-to-manage identity authentication solution available: digital certificates.

Identity authentication of every person, machine, and process in an organization is becoming an increasingly massive and complex task — particularly when including DevOps and cloud environments. Many organizations have made the decision to operate their own internal private CA to meet their digital certificate needs.

Going private with CA is a wise choice.

A private CA provides enterprises with a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario. Enterprise security teams get the industry-best benefits of public key infrastructure (PKI) authentication and encryption capabilities, but with the ability to fully control policies and configurations to the exclusive and specific needs of their organizations.

Organizations utilizing a private CA benefit from:

• Ownership of both the root CA and issuing CA
• Control over Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM)
• Scalable provisioning to accommodate employee workforces of all sizes
• Flexibility to support DevOps solutions requiring frequent and large numbers of certificates for application development

Beware of On-Premise Deployment Weaknesses

Though the benefits of a private CA are abundant, there are possible risks if it is deployed on-premise versus the cloud, including:

1. Lack of Simplicity: Running a private on-premise CA can be both time-consuming and expensive. In addition to managing the certificates, organizations must own, build, and maintain the entire CA infrastructure — tasks that require dedicated and specialized staff. That staff must have specific technical PKI expertise and skills, and be able to perform rigorous, unending security examinations and analysis. Don’t forget the expensive data center infrastructure needed for hosting the CA.
2. Lack of Coverage: Some organizations use Microsoft CA (MSCA) as a private CA solution. That may work if the only need is to serve Microsoft applications within the organization. But if the need is to secure a public-facing website, for example, or iOS or Android-based devices, a different solution is required. MSCA simply won’t work for those options. The same challenge holds true of most other dedicated private CA solutions such as Amazon Web Services and DevOps automation tools. Most enterprises need support for a wide variety of certificates, not just for a single brand. Businesses require an automated, cloud-based CLM platform to manage the exponential growth of certificates, regardless of the issuing CA.
3. Lack of Thoroughness: It’s likely that many organizations have rogue certificates hiding in the nooks and crannies of their IT infrastructure. Outages can occur if in-use certificates expire. It’s a security flaw that can put organizations at risk. The unmanaged rogue certificates can go unnoticed, and one day a critical business system is out of commission and at risk.

Sectigo’s Private CA Solution

Sectigo offers a private, cloud-based CA-agnostic solution that eliminates each of the risks detailed above. Sectigo’s Private CA offers a high-capacity infrastructure with near-instantaneous issuance of private certificates, providing visibility and automated CLM across all the certificates in an organization’s environment. Private CA also takes on all the work of hosting, maintenance, security, and compliance. A component of Sectigo Certificate Manager, its private CA provides:

• Single pane-of-glass management of all human, machine, and application identities using PKI
• Centralized and automated CLM that includes Private CA and publicly trusted certificates
• Automatic discovery and cataloging of the entire inventory of certificates
• A hassle-free Private CA that unburdens organizations from all the operational aspects of running a Private CA (many organizations choose to have Sectigo take care of the hosting, maintenance, security, and compliance work)

Sectigo provides the full range of private CA benefits while eliminating the risks and shortfalls that come with most other solutions. Sectigo’s Private CA is proof that, while going private may be ideal, it doesn’t always have to be more expensive.

The Proof Is in the Trying

Trying Sectigo’s Private CA is fast, easy, and free. Just get the trial version of Sectigo Certificate Manager and start your full-feature Private CA setup. You’ll be issuing your own private certificates in just minutes. In a flash, you can go from dreaming about the benefits of Private CA to enjoying the benefits of Private CA.