While conventional wisdom of those who don’t trust the cloud has been that on premises is more secure, the important reality is that on premises is only more secure if you have the expertise and you are willing to allocate your experts’ time to its appropriate management.
Gone are the days of questionable cloud security, as service providers are making strides to provide a more agile and pain free move – especially in the realm of public key infrastructure (PKI). With a recent Right Scale report, a “multi-cloud” or “hybrid” approach increased 3% in 2016, sitting at current 85% of enterprises using a multi-cloud strategy. But, is keeping your PKI and its overall lifecycle management on premise really a much safer bet? I’m going to dive deep on reasons why migrating to a cloud-based PKI managed service model may mitigate more risk, increase efficiency and lower operating costs.
PKI Administration & Infrastructure Management Woes
Have you ever:
- Been overloaded with work, had so much to do and wish you could cut some of your more mundane responsibilities in half or reduce them in any way?
- Needed to hire multiple PKI experts and define standardized operating procedure controls, but faced budget constraints?
- Faced the burden of having to deal with standing up ever increasing infrastructures and being forced to allocate your staff to support and manage those infrastructures instead of focuing on more important systems and security tasks,all while safely growing your enterprise?
Not only is PKI more complicated than most people realize, it is something that operates on a long timescale, so it is easy to put aside, ignore or completely forget about.
Migrating to a cloud-based managed PKI can relieve most of the issues stated above for your IT administrators and PKI certificate officers. With a Managed PKI, you’re getting a more “tailored” solution that is completely compatible with your current security infrastructure, plus a quicker time to market and lower operating costs. With CSS’ cloud-based managed PKI, CMS Sapphire, you’ll be free to pay attention to the other tasks begging your attention and trust that our cloud and PKI services have your back.
Mitigating Risks with Public Key Infrastructure
According to a 2016 CRN report, malicious infrastructure attacks increased 3500% in 2016. The same report stated that these numbers are expected to experience rapid continual growth throughtout 2017. We’ve seen multiple crypto bug variants making their way through numerous enterprises this year, affecting applications and infrastructure alike. Falling under attack and being susceptible to such risks can lead to massive outages with enormous costs. Another report found many organizations have not patched for the exploits this ransomware uses to penetrate their networks.
“WannaCry was so infectious because it used an exploit developed by the NSA and then leaked by the Shadow Brokers and dumped on the internet. But there was a patch available for vulnerability months before it was used to such destructive effect in WannaCry. Patching systems is tedious and time-consuming and often those patches have to be tested to make sure they don’t break anything else inside a business.”
–“Ransomware attacks: Here’s what we need to learn from WannaCry and Petya” by Steve Ranger, TechRepublic
If your enterprise was to fall under attack, you would have less critical systems to restore from backup thanks to your PKI’s safe and comfortable off premise cloud location. The CMS Sapphire operations team would be busy patching and meeting the needs of your PKI, mitigating your worry and risk. Learn more about the efficiency, security and cost savings of CMS Sapphire directly from our VP of Managed Services, Chris Hickman, in his on-demand webinar:
