Simplifying Certificate Management, Credentialing

Simplifying security and identity management is an essential and challenging objective for any organisation. To help streamline these efforts and reduce costs, Entrust announces the launch of Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services. The cloud-based service consolidates the management of digital identities, SSL certificates and credentials via a single solution platform.

“With the substantial increase in connected devices and distributed computing, strong identity solutions are more important than ever as a critical security layer,” said David Wagner, president of Entrust. “Organisations often deploy separate, disparate point solutions that result in difficult, time-consuming and expensive deployment and management. By consolidating identity management in the cloud, the Entrust solution helps reduce expenses, deployment challenges and management headaches that stem from legacy security solutions and techniques.”

Now part of Datacard Group, Entrust is consolidating its most popular certificate and credentialing solutions under the Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services portfolio. This transformation empowers users with a unified management console that provides a new level of visibility, ease of use and scalability.

“Increasingly sophisticated attacks against credentials and identity stores are driving the demand for airtight security,” said Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest. “An easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use digital certificate service will enhance security geometrically at most organisations.”

A New Cloud Portfolio
Scalable and user-friendly, Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services enable true versatility as the security and identity requirements of an organisation evolve over time — all without affecting existing infrastructure investments.
The new solution introduces a more integrated product offering. Customers will receive the same trusted security solution under a more consolidated brand. The service offers five distinct components:
· Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services SSL
(formerly Entrust Certificate Management Service)
· Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services Discovery
(formerly Entrust Discovery)
· Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services Smart Credentials
(expected later in 2014)
· Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services PKI
(formerly Entrust Managed Services PKI; expected later 2014)
· Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services Device Certificates

Cloud Security Management is Reliable
Entrust has been at the forefront of hosted security solutions for decades, providing the expertise to offer customers reliable, secure cloud solutions today.
That refinement results in proven safeguards for Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services, including 256-bit SSL certificates and cryptographic components (evaluated annually against the FIPS 140 and Common Criteria standards) that encrypt all communication between administrators and the service.

The infrastructure that powers Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services PKI is housed in established secure facilities, features a highly available and fully redundant framework with intelligent monitoring, and robust data backup and exceptional disaster recovery. Certain offerings of certificate-related services are trusted by and cross-certified with the U.S. Federal Bridge Certification Authority (FBCA).

Cloud-Based Certificate Management
Managing the purchase, deployment, renewal and expiry of digital certificates for multiple Web servers, purposes and users — occasionally in many different locations — can be time-consuming and costly.

Formerly the Entrust Certificate Management Service, Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services SSL is a self-service application offered to every certificate customer. The same management service Entrust customers have lauded for years — but now fully integrated with complementary Entrust solutions — is designed to streamline certificate management while providing secure certificates from a trusted brand in online security.

For organisations managing five or more certificates, the cloud-based certificate management solution has been tailored for enterprises. Perfect for power users, Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services SSL Enterprise includes all the features of the standard offering, but adds additional capabilities such as enhanced reporting, instance issuance, certificate recycling and custom fields — making it more suitable for large-scale environments.

Easy Certificate Discovery
As various types of digital certificates are introduced to an organisation, they become more difficult to track and manage — particularly if they are issued from different certification authorities.

Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services Discovery streamlines this process with a solution that finds, inventories and manages digital certificates across diverse systems to prevent outages, data breaches and non-compliance. Organisations can avoid costly application outages, implement notifications, prove compliance and defend infrastructure all with a single certificate discovery solution.

PKI On Demand
Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services PKI — formerly Entrust Managed Services PKI — establishes and manages certificate-based security across an organisation through a reliable, customisable and flexible hosted public key infrastructure (PKI).

Entrust’s cloud-based PKI service eliminates up-front capital investment and can help in significantly reducing ongoing operation costs associated with in-house PKI software. In addition, it provides built-in maintenance capabilities and speeds deployment time.

The solution enables the auto-enrollment of certificates to networks of trusted users, remote employees, partners, suppliers and devices, which allows end-users to sign documents and trust each other’s digital signatures. Auto enrollment services are also supported for VPN, Web users and devices.

Authenticating Mobile Devices, Identities
In the defense against malware, unauthorised breaches and other malicious or targeted online attacks, managing and strongly identifying mobile devices is now a critical element to a successful information security strategy.

To better defend against such attacks, organisations may now leverage Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services to deploy device certificates for secure access to internal networks, cloud applications, Wi-Fi or VPN connections — regardless of the type of device.

Digital certificates provide a simple, transparent and secure approach to enable strong identity-based security for organisations embracing enterprise mobility or bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives.

Smart Credentials, Smarter Service
Complementing the innovative mobile device certificate service, Entrust’s new cloud-based smart credential solution enables organisations to produce and manage a single unified identity credential for each person associated with an enterprise, government agency or citizen population — all delivered via Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services.

Entrust’s cloud-based management console is leveraged to enroll identities, activate credentials, provision identities to mobile devices, handle day-to-day management, print credentials and even mail smartcards or USB tokens to end-users.

Streamline Security Deployment
Scalable and easy to use, Entrust IdentityGuard Cloud Services enable true versatility as the security and identity requirements of an organisation evolve over time — all without affecting existing infrastructure investments.