DigiCert Security Summit Highlights Growth, Innovation Amid Pandemic
Automation will be a big focus for DigiCert the rest of the year.
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When DigiCert acquired Symantec’s website security and related PKI solutions in 2017, it was the start of a massive, extended consolidation process.
“It took us about three years to fully consolidate and we’re still finishing up some of those consolidations,” said CEO John Merrill. “But at that point in time, it wasn’t just about combining the companies. It was about creating a new vision, what we call the DigiCert One vision, for the way the business, and this industry and security, are going to go forward.”
Thanks to COVID-19, 2020 was a transition year for DigiCert, CEO John Merrill said.
“We were able to functionally work from home pretty quickly, and fortunately in the digital business you can do that more easily,” he said. “The second thing we had to do is focus on a tremendous migration. We had over 100,000 customers who had to move to the new platform. We’ve talked about combining to a single platform and this is the year that the great migration occurred during the pandemic. We completed this migration in October to a single, modern platform that’s service based and cloud-native. The architecture has made it easy to adapt and upgrade. It’s a single platform that’s prepared to evolve continuously.”
CEO John Merrill laid out several 2021 objectives. Chief among them are compliance and industry standards.
“We want to make sure we’re compliant … and our customers are never disrupted with revocation events,” he said.
The second objective is focusing on new products, starting with SSL and transport layer security (TLS), Merrill said.
“We want to help you do your job better,” he said. “We also want to optimize validation … to be a faster and smarter process.”
DigiCert has enterprise-grade data centers in the United States and is looking to expand abroad.
“We want to take that globally so that we can do that in Europe, in Asia and Japan,” CEO John Merrill said.
DigiCert also is focused on being “completely efficient,” he said.
“We want to be fast and we want to be modern,” Merrill said. “At the end of the day, SSL has been around a long time, but you can’t stop innovating in all of your processes and we want to continue to do that.”
Brian Trzupek is DigiCert’s senior vice president of product. He said DigiCert is “going deep” on automation this year.
“We want public key infrastructure (PKI) completely seamless,” he said. “Automation is at the core of DigiCert’s strategy. We’re doing things with automation that you don’t even see.”
Partners are at the forefront of the automation strategy, said Avesta Hojjati, head of R&D. They play an essential role in educating end-customers and reselling DigiCert’s leading solutions.
“We look forward to updating them on our continuous innovation plans for 2021, including how they can help their enterprise customers deploy secure, modernized automation of their digital certificate environments,” he said.
There are nearly 91 million SSL certificates on the web today, said Dean Coclin, DigiCert’s senior director of business development. That’s up 1.8 million from February.
“DigiCert’s own share increased over 278,000 certificates last month,” he said. “Right now, we have 21 million certificates out there that are active and our own.”
Let’s Encrypt has the lion’s share of certificates, with more than half the market, Coclini said.
“That’s no surprise,” he said. “But DigiCert is actually in second place with the total number of certificates being issued out there with almost 23% of the market. Sectigo comes next and then everybody together.”
There are nearly 91 million SSL certificates on the web today, said Dean Coclin, DigiCert’s senior director of business development. That’s up 1.8 million from February.
“DigiCert’s own share increased over 278,000 certificates last month,” he said. “Right now, we have 21 million certificates out there that are active and our own.”
Let’s Encrypt has the lion’s share of certificates, with more than half the market, Coclini said.
“That’s no surprise,” he said. “But DigiCert is actually in second place with the total number of certificates being issued out there with almost 23% of the market. Sectigo comes next and then everybody together.”
Tuesday’s virtual DigiCert Security Summit highlighted a year of strong growth despite challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
John Merrill, DigiCert’s CEO, kicked off the secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate provider’s annual summit. The theme of this year’s summit is “Level Up.”
DigiCert is the largest certificate authority with about 600,000 different businesses using its certificates globally, he said. In addition, it secures 26 billion connections every day.
DigiCert’s John Merrill
“We have 89% of the Fortune 500 as customers who use our services,” Merrill said. “We have 97% of the largest banks that use DigiCert services.”
DigiCert is “very technology focused,” he said.
Avesta Hojjati is head of R&D at DigiCert.
“Together with our partners’ support, DigiCert has completed important migration of end-customers to CertCentral,” he said. “With this completed in 2020, our focus in 2021 is on automation for all certificates and innovating new products and solutions that they can add to their portfolio.”
DigiCert experienced strong growth during the pandemic, even amid adverse conditions and a major migration initiative, Hojjati said.
DigiCert’s Avesta Hojjati
“Our partners played a key role in this success, as we worked closely together to provide tools for migration and business continuity,” he said. “We deployed the necessary resources to validate end-customer certificate requests and keep pandemic-related disruptions very minimal. We grew together during the pandemic and look forward to an exciting year ahead.”
“This was a year that DigiCert moved faster than anyone has in this industry ever,” Merrill said. “And it was a reflection of the hard work of our people, and we’re very pleased about that. But we are not satisfied.”
Partners and customers can expect big things from DigiCert in 2021, he said.
Scroll through our slideshow above for more highlights from the summit.
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