Case Study: Azure Based PKI

A leader in the educational software market was developing a custom MDM solution enabling a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative for the classroom when their developers realized their need for an underlying security and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Purchasing individual certificates was out of the question, since their solution required very high certificate volume, and they were reluctant to roll out their own PKI, as reliability and high assurance were key requirements to meet their growing customer base. The customer engaged CSS after realizing that operating a full scale PKI was simply out of their wheelhouse.

Key requirements for their solution included:

• Rapid provisioning
• Scale out in high capacity to accommodate customer implementations
• Highly available and fault tolerant
• Globally accessible

Within three weeks, CSS architected, deployed, and operationalized a high quality PKI dedicated exclusively for the customer’s use that is now an integral supporting component of the customer’s solution. CSS’ PKIaaS is designed to offer full scale benefits of a dedicated, customized enterprise PKI, without the management overhead. This allowed the customer to focus on the core of their product, and meet their aggressive deployment deadlines.

CSS made the decision to host the certificate solution in Azure, based on scale, availability and global accessibility. The customer will be connecting 1.5 Million mobile devices to the CSS developed Certificate Management System (CMS) component of the service in Azure for Mobile Device Management of devices in schools around the United States.