5 Key Benefits of Microsoft PKI for Your Organization’s Security

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If you have not considered including Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions in your organization’s portfolio, you should. The global encryption software market is predicted to increase to $16.5 billion in 2024, according to a MarketsandMarkets analysis. The market’s growth drivers include a focus on demanding regulatory standards and data privacy compliance. Other causes include growing concerns about losing crucial data and the rapid adoption of cloud and virtualization technologies.

PKI’s function is changing as more internet-connected endpoints connect to company networks and new business models that rely more on digital documents emerge. It is no longer limited to isolated systems such as secure email or encrypted web traffic.

Microsoft PKI enables organizations to sign and encrypt data. It is used more frequently to serve many users, applications, and endpoints in challenging IT environments. Due to tighter regulatory norms, mainstream operating systems (OSs) and enterprise applications depend more on PKI to guarantee confidentiality.

What Is Microsoft PKI and What Is the Objective?

A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of technology and processes comprising an encryption framework that helps corporations authenticate and protect digital communications. It creates, manages, distributes, and revokes digital certificates in Microsoft Windows environment. Instead of using an email ID and password, you use digital certificates for authentication.

Some features you can implement in Microsoft PKI include:

  • 802.1x authentication to control access to the network
  • Secure an organization’s network traffic
  • Code signing to authorize and approve applications
  • Safeguard user data
  • Deploy two-factor authentication
  • Use SSL to protect traffic to internal websites

What are the Advantages of Microsoft KPI for Enterprises? 

Businesses use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to manage web security and IoT devices. Global internet users witnessed around 52 million data breaches in the second quarter of 2022. In the previous year, 57% of firms had a security issue and data breach due to a compromised digital certificate. These figures shed light on cybersecurity issues that must be addressed to reduce successful cyberattacks.

You can issue digital certificates using PKI to authenticate devices, user identity, and services seamlessly.  This helps secure public web pages, private computers, VPNS, internal WiFi, and other services that require multi-factor authentication.

Here are five ways Microsoft PKI can help improve your organization’s business processes:

1. Increases Employee and Device Trust 

Public key infrastructure is all about trust, specifically how two entities may connect safely. PKI enables safe electronic data transfer for eCommerce, online payments, and email operations. 

PKI uses cryptography public keys connected to a digital certificate to encrypt and decrypt data. The key pair comprises a mathematically connected public and private to authenticate the device or user sending the digital communication. A person who wants to communicate securely with others can share the public key but must keep the private key private. Content that has been encrypted with one of the keys can be decoded with the other. This efficient authentication solution enables users to identify people, services, and devices to boost employee and device trust. 

2. Prevents Phishing and Spoofing 

Hackers are an ongoing issue, and their activity has lately increased since COVID-19. Your clients can better defend themselves against these attacks by including PKI-based solutions in your portfolio. S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) technology will assist you in protecting your customers. This ensures that email-based phishing attacks are greatly minimized for your customers. 

If you’re looking to increase employee and device trust, PKI provides an effective solution to authenticate and identify users, services, and devices. It will also increase their faith in your corporation to help them maintain their business security. Digital certificates, digital signatures, secure email, public key encryption management, and other technologies are used to implement the technology.

3. Ensures Confidentiality, Integrity, and Authenticity 

Digital certificates, like passports, attest to the identity of the owner of a given public key (and thus the matching private key). Businesses can create a digital signature using public key cryptography that ensures the integrity and validity of messages. 

Confidentiality relates to the security and privacy of data, as well as ensuring that no one other than the intended parties gets access to it. It prevents eavesdropping, assures that communications cannot be altered, and authenticates the sender of a message.

4. Solves IoT Security Challenges

PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) use in manufacturing can help curb cyberattacks on IoT devices. A solid PKI-based identity assurance strategy can aid authentication, data encryption, and network-connected device integrity.

IoT-connected devices are vulnerable to assaults from other devices. If an attacker has access to only one device on the network, they can swiftly corrupt all other linked devices in a home network. 

By encrypting communication between devices, PKI can be used to secure IoT connectivity. 

This is critical for equipment such as medical devices or industrial gear that handles sensitive data. For example, a medical device may use PKI to encrypt communication between devices to secure patient information.

5. Automation

Enterprises seek fast, automated technology solutions that allow teams to remain agile and in control. Fortunately, many PKI operations, such as digital certificate enrollment, provisioning, and installation, may be automated, making organization-wide security considerably easier.  

Modern cloud-based PKI products provide a one-stop shop for automating certificate management across all use cases. They can also be accessed via REST APIs to combine certificate administration with existing infrastructure.

PKI automation aids in managing the certificate lifecycle by reducing human errors that might otherwise increase the risk of a data breach. PKI automation also ensures that all machine identities are controlled and safeguarded, removing the risk of non-compliance due to expired certificates in essential systems.

In Conclusion

PKI simplifies identifying individuals, devices, and apps while providing strong encryption to ensure that communication between both sides remains private and secure. You can seamlessly create digital signatures and certificates in addition to authentication and identification. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) promotes employee and device confidence by authenticating the identity of users, devices, or services. It protects connected devices, users, or services from spoofing or phishing.

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