When machine identities outnumber human identities 15 to one, securing PKI in your enterprise might feel impossible.
Managing a constantly growing volume of devices, departments, users, and certificates becomes overwhelming, leading to inefficiencies and vulnerabilities across your organization. Adding Certificate Authorities (CA) without a process or a strategy makes CA sprawl tough to contain, especially if no one has final authority over the “PKI problem.” Without proper governance and specialized PKI knowledge, enterprises risk losing control of their PKI environments.
This lack of oversight can result in outages, unnecessary complexity, and increased operational costs. IT teams, already stretched thin with other responsibilities, often find themselves burned out trying to manage PKI across the organization. Security risks mount when certificates are left unmanaged to expire without notice.
And even small mistakes can have big consequences for enterprises of any size!
That’s where Keyfactor comes in: centralized PKI management is a way to simplify certificate control, automate key tasks, and minimize security risks.
Here are five enterprise PKI challenges we observe often, and our expert suggestions for managing your certificate lifecycle. Let’s dive in!
Managing your own PKI is expensive
When it comes to managing PKI at scale, the choice between an internal CA and a hosted CA hinges on flexibility and cost. An internal CA offers a high degree of control and customization, which may seem appealing, but with rapid growth the costs of managing hardware, software, and dedicated PKI teams can balloon, straining already stretched budgets.
Our recommendation: Share the risk with a trusted partner
A trustworthy hosted CA can serve as a viable middle ground, offering many of the benefits of an internal CA without the heavy financial and operational burden. This model allows enterprises to maintain control over their certificate lifecycle while leveraging a more cost-efficient, flexible solution that adapts as their needs grow.
Certificate sprawl is common
If you’re tackling certificate sprawl, you’re not alone. According to the 2024 Digital Trust & PKI report, even businesses that consider themselves to have mature machine identity management strategies struggle when it comes to implementation.
Misconfigurations of PKI and certificates are an escalating concern, with 58% of organizations naming it a growing issue. The root of the problem often lies in manual, fragmented processes that don’t scale with your organization. As the volume of certificates grows, outdated processes increase the likelihood of errors, leading to unplanned outages and heightened security risks. Without a centralized, automated system, organizations are left vulnerable, unable to keep up with the rapid pace of change.
Our solution: automation and centralization
By automating certificate management and centralizing oversight, your organization can mitigate risk and minimize human error as your enterprise PKI infrastructure scales. That’s why our platform offers a centralized approach to certificate management that integrates seamlessly into your ecosystem.
PKI experts need specialized attention to detail
Effective PKI management requires deep technical knowledge, particularly when it comes to configuring certificates, selecting algorithms, determining key lengths, and managing PKI traffic.
But this level of expertise is hard to come by, and building a team with the required PKI knowledge in-house can be costly and time-consuming. Even well-resourced organizations struggle to keep up with the latest cryptographic standards and best practices, not to mention the complexity of integrating these elements into a coherent, secure PKI infrastructure. Without this specialized knowledge, it’s all too easy for someone to miss something important, leaving your organization at risk.
Our advice: partner with a trusted provider to bridge the gaps.
Managed PKI services can optimize certificate configurations, keep cryptographic algorithms up to date, and monitor key lengths to meet the latest security standards. Plus, managed services can efficiently manage your PKI traffic, reducing the risk of performance bottlenecks or unexpected outages.
Secure key storage is challenging
At the heart of PKI are public and private keys, the essential elements used to encrypt and decrypt transmitted data. As your organization scales, however, the number of private keys in circulation increases dramatically, making it more difficult to store and manage them securely. Improper key storage is a slippery slope, and mismanagement can expose your organization to unauthorized access, data breaches, and compromised certificates.
One of the most critical mistakes? Storing private keys in insecure locations, like shared servers, plaintext files, or improperly protected devices. Once a private key is compromised, any certificate tied to it becomes vulnerable, which can lead to data exfiltration, service outages, and reputational damage. The rapid growth of IoT devices, cloud environments, and other connected systems amplifies the need for a centralized, automated key management solution.
Our recommendation: Lock keys in secure vaults.
At Keyfactor, private keys are always stored in a highly secure environment, such as hardware security models (HSMs) or secure cloud-based vaults. Automated key management processes help maintain visibility and control over keys as your enterprise scales. Centralized key storage and management significantly reduces the likelihood of key exposure, strengthening the integrity of your PKI infrastructure and leaving you with peace of mind.
Comprehensive enterprise PKI governance
In smaller organizations, it’s relatively easy to maintain consistency in how certificates are used and managed. With fewer teams and certificates to track, communication and management are simpler. But large enterprises can suffer from fragmented certificate management when different departments and teams deploy certificates independently.
DevOps teams in particular are known for moving fast and deploying certificates without always considering the broader PKI strategy. This agility might speed up development, but it comes at the cost of proper documentation and oversight. Without centralized governance, it’s all too easy for certificates to be misconfigured, expired, or left unmanaged—a fertile field for exploitation.
One common mistake we’ve observed: the use of self-signed certificates for public-facing assets. While self-signed certs might seem convenient for quick deployments or sandbox environments, they lack the verification and trust CA-issued certificates provide. Using a self-signed certificate on a public-facing asset can open the door to man-in-the-middle attacks, risking not only your organization’s infrastructure but your reputation.
Our solution: Unify PKI management to mitigate risk.
Implementing a PKIaaS solution unifies your organization’s approach to certificate management, giving visibility across the enterprise, enforcing best practices, and automating essential processes like certificate renewal and configuration. This helps large businesses stay on the same page even as they scale, reducing the risk of security lapses and operational headaches.
Why build from scratch when you don’t have to?
Designing and managing enterprise PKI is no small feat. The sheer scale of certificates, keys, devices, and users involved, along with the need for airtight security, makes it complex. Without a centralized strategy and the right expertise, the risks of misconfigurations, certificate outages, and security vulnerabilities can quickly get out of hand.
Partner with Keyfactor to avoid our most commonly observed PKI mistakes. Our PKIaaS solutions ensure compliance with important regulations, automate critical tasks, and free up your teams to focus on other priorities.
With the right tools and expert guidance, you can create a scalable, secure, and efficient PKI infrastructure that grows alongside your organization. Contact Keyfactor today to help you design a future-proof PKI to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term security success.
