- PKI is the framework of CAs, keys, certificates, and policies that issues and manages digital identities.
- Four jobs never stop: certificate issuance, revocation, governance, and compliance.
- Modern PKI must unify public and private CAs and automate issuance to scale beyond manual processes.
- Continuous evidence beats annual audits — visibility comes first, automation makes it sustainable.
What is PKI?
PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) is the framework of certificate authorities, keys, certificates, and policies that issues and manages digital identities — enabling encryption, authentication, and integrity across an organization.
CAs are one component of PKI. PKI is the broader system: certificates, key material, revocation infrastructure, and the policies and procedures that govern them.
It underpins HTTPS/TLS, email signing, code signing, VPNs, mutual TLS between services, device authentication, and anywhere identity and encryption are needed.
Four jobs that never stop.
Certificate issuance: provisioning trusted certificates to every identity that needs one — at scale and within policy.
Revocation: withdrawing trust quickly when a key is compromised, via CRL and OCSP.
Governance: defining who can request what, from which CAs, with which key strengths.
Compliance: proving the PKI meets SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA, and internal control requirements.
Traditional PKI was not built for this scale.
Visibility first: you cannot govern certificates you cannot see.
Public + private: unify external CAs and internal PKI like ADCS into one operational view.
Automate issuance: manual provisioning cannot scale to modern volumes.
Continuous compliance and policy enforcement on CA choice, key size, and wildcard use turn audits into a byproduct instead of a project.
Modern PKI without the operations tax.
A discovery layer that surfaces every certificate from every CA — public, cloud, and private — into one inventory.
Policy as code: guardrails on CA, key strength, and algorithm enforced automatically.
Automated renewal and deployment so PKI scales beyond the volumes humans can track.
Audit-ready reporting that produces continuous evidence of controls.