How to Gain Guaranteed ROI with a Managed PKI

What is a Managed PKI? – Your PKI, Our Management and Service
CMS Sapphire™ professionally managed Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) from Certified Security Solutions (CSS) allows you to maintain complete control over the use of your Root CA keys and PKI recovery materials while transferring day-to-day PKI management and oversight to experts.

• Dedicated PKI Environment: Customer-devoted root CA, no shared infrastructure
• Holistic Digital Certificate Lifecycle Management: Automated lifecycle management of every certificate in your
  environment – including publicly-trusted certificates and certificates from other issuing authorities
• 24/7/365 Monitoring: Constant PKI observation to ensure operational health
• Response Expectations: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with guaranteed response times
• Site License: Unlimited usage, no counting, no up-charges

CMS Sapphire™ allows organizations to reap the benefits of a dedicated and highly-customizable PKI, with the flexibility and scalability of cloud delivery, and rapid deployment models that reduce typical rollout timelines by more than 50%.

There are a number of different nuances among managed PKI use cases, but some business challenges are universal.
PKI is complex to begin with: Good PKI or secure PKI is simply not easy to do. Many businesses deploy PKI without the
proper operations and security model, resulting in either failure or poor organizational security posture. Over time, many
organizations mistakenly let certificates go “into the wild,” having lost track of where they actually reside and what they are really protecting.

Finding the right resources with the right expertise is a difficult endeavor: PKI requires specialty knowledge around
both deployment and the operations model. Because of the complexity of PKI alone, problems are likely to arise unless
you happen to have that knowledge within your organization, and equally important, the depth in personnel to be able to
execute it properly. The number of professionals specialized in PKI is waning. Furthermore, PKI is not always considered a
core operation within the enterprise. While PKI operations should be elevated to a valuable enterprise operation, it doesn’t necessarily need to be managed internally.

Lack of access to the right tools and processes makes tracking and management a hurdle: Without the right tools and
processes to manage PKI operations, there are a number of consequences that can be hard to remediate. IT specialists
might overemphasize focus on the infrastructure and how to get certificates out initially and underestimate the effort
dealing with pending expirations and outage prevention. Without system management and software that can properly
track the lifecycle of certificates, expirations and outages can happen and disrupt business operations and required audits
become difficult, expensive and time consuming.

There are many cost advantages to having a professionally managed PKI – a business decision which guarantees ROI. Frankly, the capital expenditure and expertise needed to properly manage a solid internally run PKI is considerable, forcing many organizations to make critical PKI operations a secondary task. However, adopting a managed PKI with no per-certificate costs can save a significant amount of capital and allow your PKI to get the attention it needs to protect your business.