Sectigo Experiences Record Demand for Digital Identity Management as Enterprises Strengthen Remote Access and Business Continuity

“In recent months, Sectigo has seen three times the inbound information requests from large enterprises seeking to automate, consolidate, and manage the digital identities of employees and endpoints across their organizations,” said Jonathan Skinner, CMO, Sectigo. “Digital certificates are the gold standard for ensuring identity. Across the globe, our teams are helping customers rapidly deploy PKI solutions that solve today’s authentication challenges while future-proofing their businesses for tomorrow.”

Digital Identity as the New Perimeter

Sectigo Certificate Manager, the heart of Sectigo’s Digital Identity Management Platform, delivers the automation, orchestration, and visibility required for a Zero Trust strategy. The platform’s unique cloud-based system offers compelling advantages over on-premise alternatives. Compatible with all popular devices, operating systems, protocols, and chipsets, Sectigo Certificate Manager provides visibility into certificates of all types through a single cloud-based solution.

Enterprises have historically provided protection within a firewalled network architecture. However, this approach has evolved to accommodate complex environments with mobile devices, multi-cloud, DevOps, BYOD, IoT, and more, thus elevating digital identity as the new perimeter. In this modern organization, security teams often work toward a Zero Trust model where access and permissions are granted narrowly and as needed on a case-by-case basis to users, devices, and processes in the environment.

For Zero Trust to be effective, enterprises need a proven digital identity mechanism, driving demand for automated cloud-based management of digital certificates. The Sectigo Digital Identity Management Platform protects the Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) of the modern enterprise for all certificate use cases, including:

• TLS / SSL certificates for websites, internal servers, and DevOps environments
• Device and user certificates for easy-to-use, fool-proof access control
• Mobile device certificates to control access for BYOD and company-assigned devices
• S/MIME certificates to encrypt and authenticate email communication
• IoT certificates for securing connected devices
• Code signing certificates to ensure the integrity of all code running in an environment

Securing the Remote Workforce and Ensuring Business Continuity

More than ever, IT teams understand how digital identities fit into their secure, geographically dispersed architecture. Automating the discovery, issuance, and renewal of public certificates saves time for security and operations personnel and reduces enterprise risk. Sectigo’s automation platform can be instrumental when rapidly migrating people, processes, and data to WFH environments—limiting risk and burden to employees—by following three steps:

• Replace passwords with user identity certificates — PKI-based identity certificates are the strongest form of identity and make life easier for employees, reducing the burden of remembering, updating, and managing passwords.
• Replace multi-factor authentication with no-touch authentication — Unlike hardware-token multi-factor authentication (MFA), or SMS-based MFA, Sectigo digital certificates simplify the employee experience by easing the burden of security when a workforce is remote. Certificate-based authentication also offers the highest assurance that the people, devices, and processes are, in fact, legitimate.
• Automate the issuance of all identity certificates — Automation provides benefits across the certificate lifecycle, enabling IT security teams to issue, revoke, and replace certificates quickly, reliably, and at scale, while alleviating their management burden.

The current pandemic is just one example of the risk organizations face when their normal work processes are disrupted. During the 2018 U.S. government shutdown, many employees who managed security maintenance were furloughed, resulting in sweeping outages. In a single week, as many as 130 federal websites and services went offline or assumed risk due to certificate expirations.

Organizations must protect against the danger of outdated certificates as business continuity is tied to the livelihood of employees now more than ever. Sectigo helps prevent certificate-related outages through a broad range of automation technologies, including Enrollment over Secure Transport (EST),

Secure Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP), and Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME), which integrates with a wide range of web servers, load balancers, and other networking gear, as well as DevOps environments.

To learn more about Sectigo’s Digital Identity Management Platform, IoT Identity Management Platform, or Web Security Platform, visit www.sectigo.com.

About Sectigo

Sectigo is a leading cybersecurity provider of digital identity solutions, including TLS / SSL certificates, DevOps, IoT, and enterprise-grade PKI management, as well as multi-layered web security. As the world's largest commercial Certificate Authority with more than 700,000 customers and over 20 years of experience in online trust, Sectigo partners with organizations of all sizes to deliver automated public and private PKI solutions for securing webservers, user access, connected devices, and applications. Recognized for its award-winning innovation and best-in-class global customer support, Sectigo has the proven performance needed to secure the digital landscape of today and tomorrow. For more information, follow @SectigoHQ.