Ramona Adams
A Thales-sponsored report, based on a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, shows that 54 percent of information technology security practitioners consider cloud-based services as the most important trend that influences the use of public key infrastructure.
The 2017 PKI Global Trends Report also revealed that 40 percent of respondents believe the internet of things is the main driver of PKI deployment — a figure that has doubled over the past three years, Thales said Tuesday.
PKIs are mostly used for authentication, digital signing and encryption as a core service that supports a range of use cases and applications, Thales noted.
“Not only are PKIs a core enterprise asset, but they are playing an increasingly important role supporting certificate issuance needs for cloud applications and the IoT,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon.
“Smart organizations have determined that successful IoT deployment rests on trust being established from the beginning, and they’re leaning on their PKI as one component for building that trust,” he added.
The report also found that 43 percent of respondents believe PKI usage in support of IoT will include cloud-based and enterprise-based PKIs.
PKIs are deployed in more than eight different applications within a business on an average, with secure sockets layers, virtual private networks, public cloud apps and device authentication as the top technologies supported by PKI.
Approximately 66 percent of organizations claim to use PKI and 36 percent of respondents employ hardware security modules to secure their PKI, according to the report.
The Thales report includes responses from more than 1,500 IT security practitioners worldwide.
