The importance of identity and access management in maintaining zero-trust environments cannot be overemphasized. Cybercriminals are constantly on the prowl, looking for ways to sell personal information and company data for a fortune. This has resulted in the steady increase of data breaches experienced by companies in different industries over the years, leading to a loss of trust in the affected organizations.
To counteract this trend, it is becoming increasingly important for organizations to deploy public key infrastructure (PKI) as a cybersecurity lock-and-key system for protecting data, authenticating access, securing communications, and ensuring data integrity and non-repudiation. PKI involves the use of key pairs, which are mathematically related to encrypt and decrypt information.
In a practical sense, imagine that your company has several departments, each with a feedback box in a mailroom where anyone in the company can drop messages. Each department’s box and the mailroom have a public key that allows access to message dropping. However, the head of each department is provided with a private key that only they possess. This key is the only one in the entire company that can unlock a department’s feedback box to access messages.
PKI can be deployed across a corporate network to create a zero-trust environment, where everything written to or retrieved from a server or device is authenticated and encrypted. For instance, when a website uses a TLS/SSL certificate to encrypt communication between a customer’s browser and the website’s server, it is using PKI encryption.
Deploying and maintaining PKI requires vast resources and talent, which many organizations might not have. As a result, organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-based PKI and PKI-as-a-service (PKIaaS), which offers several benefits for enterprises of all sizes. Cloud PKIaaS can be integrated into existing security systems and operational in a matter of days, is agile, scalable, and offers security by protecting private keys in Federal Information Process Standards (FIPS)-compliant hardware security modules (HSMs) stored in geographically dispersed data centers.
Deploying PKI and encrypting data across an enterprise network is a cost-effective way of ensuring cybersecurity for organizations. The average cost of a data breach is $4.35 million in 2022, and failure to protect company and personal data could lead to loss of trust, legal battles and other liabilities.
Mrugesh Chandarana, the Product Management Director for Identity and Access Management Solutions at HID Global, focuses on IoT and PKI solutions. With more than ten years of experience in cybersecurity risk management, he advocates for using PKI as a cybersecurity lock-and-key system to secure data and resources. He has previously held product management positions at other cybersecurity firms such as WhiteHat Security, RiskVision, and RiskSense.
In conclusion, deploying PKI as a cybersecurity lock-and-key system to provide data security and authenticity is vital. It is recommended that organizations consider cloud-based PKI and PKIaaS as viable options for deploying and maintaining PKI in their networks. Organizations that invest in PKI encryption will save costs in the long run and protect their reputation from cybersecurity breaches.