In our previous blog post, the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study showed how organizations can turn PKI from a necessary cost into a measurable business advantage, to the tune of a 356% ROI and $9.9 million in net present value over three years.
As we continue our blog series, we will now dive into how those numbers came into being, what they mean, and how they translate to your organization.
90-minute to 2-minute provisioning
The cost:
Provisioning certificates takes time. First, you generate a certificate signing request (CSR). Then it’s onto the certificate authority (CA) and getting approval. Finally, you retrieve the certificate and get it where it needs to go. All of this adds up to an average of astonishingly inefficient 90 minutes. PER CERTIFICATE. Now, multiply that by the $75 per hour for personnel who manually manage certificates, and to compound this, you know the number of required certificates increases every year.
The future:
With automation, the time required to provision a certificate can be cut from 90 minutes to two minutes. Now, your team is set to scale by handling exponentially more certificates with an even lower headcount. This opens up personnel who used to manually manage certificates to now focus on value-driving, strategic work.
«Estamos ahorrando una cantidad enorme de horas en la gestión de servicios de certificados privados gracias a Keyfactor. En este momento, gestionamos el doble de certificados con la mitad de recursos».
Expert, cybersecurity, telecommunications
16x cert growth with same staff
The cost:
Certificates are proliferating rapidly. New use cases arise every day with the implementation of AI, workloads, and other non-human identity sources. With unscalable, manual processes, the manpower and resources required to maintain must grow linearly with the influx of certificates.
The future:
In addition to slashing time for provisioning, automation’s role in renewals drastically increases the ability to scale. Instead of manually monitoring and initiating renewals, workflows can automatically update certificates, eliminating a mundane, monotonous task from valuable resources.
«La mejor prueba del valor que nos ha aportadoKeyfactor la capacidad de multiplicar por diez el uso de certificados con el mismo número de recursos que teníamos hace cinco años».
Project manager, information security, retail
95% incident reduction
The cost:
What you can’t see can hurt you. Without centralized visibility, certificate outages are inevitable and can range in impact from minor internal disruptions to significant customer-facing outages. No matter whether the outage is caused by an expired certificate or one that is improperly deployed, it’s going to cost you:
- Personnel hours to find and remedy the problem
- Time away from what they were supposed to be doing
- Interruption of services
- Reputational costs
The future:
Visibility and automation are the two main drivers behind reducing certificate outages. First, having all certificates and their associated metadata (i.e. expiration date, owner), teams can quickly see any certificates that are about to expire and take immediate action. Automation makes that process even easier. Low-impact certificates can be set for auto-renewal, while more important ones can have automated processes for approvals and reminders sent. That same automation can even handle the installation, reducing the risk of improper installation.
«En el último año, o en los últimos cinco años, solo hemos tenido un caso [de certificado caducado] con un tiempo de inactividad mínimo. A una persona de nuestro equipo le bastó con una hora para averiguar qué había pasado y renovar el certificado».
Project manager, information security, retail
70+ servers retired
The cost:
Infrastructure costs money. Not just the up-front capital investment for the CA servers, HSMs, and database servers, but also the licensing, the headcount to maintain it, and even the electric bill all add up.
The future:
With multi-tenancy and hybrid on-premises/SaaS solutions, consolidation opportunities are abound. Instead of a single server per CA instance, multiple PKI hierarchies can reside on one piece of hardware, or be offloaded completely to a managed SaaS offering. This decreases the hardware requirements, in turn relieving the pressure on maintenance teams.
«La gran ventaja en cuanto a costes es que ya no tenemos que ocuparnos de lo que, en la práctica, eran entre 80 y 100 servidores y cortafuegos a los que había que aplicar parches».
Expert, cybersecurity, telecommunications
<6-month payback
Cada ahorro contribuye a un gran beneficio: una amortización en menos de seis meses y un retorno de la inversión del 356 % en tres años. La PKI ya no tiene por qué ser un centro de costes que agota los recursos. Con la reducción de los gastos generales y la liberación de recursos técnicos, la modernización de la PKI no solo se amortiza por sí misma, sino que también sigue generando valor empresarial. Sin aumentar la plantilla, las organizaciones pueden aumentar la eficiencia empresarial, reasignar recursos a proyectos más orientados a los resultados empresariales y estar preparadas para gestionar certificados a gran escala.
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