Highlights from Keyfactor Connect 2024

This year, Keyfactor marked a significant milestone by hosting its first customer-exclusive user group events – Keyfactor Connect. The intent behind these events was clear: to create a platform where customers and end-users could engage, learn, and connect. Suffice it to say, mission accomplished.

In both London and Frankfurt, it was incredible to see a community of 60+ customers join from different industries and perspectives – manufacturing, oil and energy, government agencies, financial services, and tech leaders – all with one goal in mind: To connect and learn from their peers and industry experts.

This blog provides a quick recap of key sessions and highlights from the event and our plan for the future of Keyfactor Connect in 2025.

One of the standout sessions was led by Tomas Gustavsson, Chief PKI Officer at Keyfactor. Tomas focused on PKI Possibilities, emphasizing several changes and disruptions on the horizon, including shorter TLS certificate lifespans, emerging standards for workload identities, new regulations like DORA and NIS 2, software supply chain security initiatives, and most notably, the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). It’s clear that these trends were top of mind for attendees, and many teams are already taking proactive steps to prepare for disruptive changes ahead.

The events also featured roadmap sessions where product experts shared the latest updates and upcoming innovations across the full suite of PKI, certificate lifecycle automation, and digital signing solutions.

Attendees were particularly excited about the recently released Next-Generation Hardware Appliance, engaging in an on-site demo of the “PKI in a box” to see EJBCA Enterprise in action. Other major updates included new integrations, advancements in platform modernization, and of course, support for NIST-standardized post-quantum algorithms across all products.

GRENKE’s presentation on their self-service PKI journey was another highlight of the event. The session provided a real-world example of the trials and tribulations of achieving PKI success.

Olaf Rohleder, Systems Engineer at GRENKE, also shared how his team eliminated bottlenecks and reduced outages due to expired certificates by implementing Keyfactor Command. Olaf cited their transformation from manual to self-service, and how his team save roughly 4-5 hours per week and the importance of training application owners on proper processes to request certificates.

Following the events, attendees were left with practical insights and takeaways. A few key highlights that stood out from the events were:

1. PKI is critical infrastructure: It’s clear that PKI isn’t just software, it’s critical infrastructure that securely connects every device, application, and website that keeps our society running. It’s also a shared responsibility that must be understood and supported across the business to be successful.
2. Change is constant: Emerging use cases, PQ algorithms, shorter TLS lifespans, and new identity standards all stress the need for teams to be agile. IT and security teams can no longer get away with manual processes and legacy infrastructure; the time for automation and modernization is now.
3. The need for new tools: New complexities call for new solutions. Many customers are thinking bigger about digital trust, investigating new features and deployment models to meet new demands for scale and speed, whether it’s on the factory floor, in the datacenter, in the enterprise, or in the cloud. Flexibility is the name of the game.

Keyfactor Connect was an incredible opportunity for the Keyfactor user community to gather and exchange insights, tackle new challenges together, and discover best practices for securing their digital infrastructure. In the ever-changing world of digital trust, events like Keyfactor Connect are essential to sharing knowledge and driving the future of digital trust forward, together.

Next up, Keyfactor Connect is hitting Miami! On March 4-5, 2025, industry leaders and experts will join forces at Keyfactor Tech Days in Miami Beach for a two-day event packed with sessions you won’t want to miss. A half-day will be dedicated exclusively to end-users at Keyfactor Connect, Tech Days Edition, with speakers from Zoom, ServiceNow, M&T Bank, GRENKE, and more sharing their insights and best practices.

Check out the program and register now!