DigiCert Unveils Certificate Management Platform, Research Initiative

DigiCert is rolling out CertCentral Enterprise, a new certificate management platform for cloud and hosted environments.

CertCentral Enterprise provides enterprise customers better control over certificate security and compliance, the company said. Organizations get around-the-clock visibility, remediation, and expertise and guidance to protect their businesses, customers and reputations.

DigiCert’s Jeremy Rowley

Jeremy Rowley, DigiCert’s chief of product, tells Channel Partners that partners stand to “benefit greatly” from CertCentral Enterprise, which adds a “strong certificate management platform offering” that partners can serve to their enterprise customers alongside individual certificate products.

“We also have a CertCentral for partners to help them streamline their back-end management of their certificate operations,” he said. “CertCentral is built on representational state transfer (REST) and GraphQL APIs so that partners can tie in their customer services into CertCentral functionality.”

CertCentral Enterprise pulls together the combined strengths of DigiCert and the acquired Symantec Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) businesses. It allows customers to customize and automate all stages of life-cycle management for transport layer security/secure sockets layer (TLS/SSL) and other digital certificate types from a user interface.

“CertCentral Enterprise is a platform built on the principles of agile development and a continuous release cycle,” Rowley said. “This gives customers, including those serviced by partners, access to regular enhancements and new features. We have a road map for continued improvements that make this the best certificate management platform in the market. Partners also will benefit from the many back-end improvements that go into DigiCert’s systems and CertCentral Enterprise, including faster and more efficient certificate validation and issuance services.”

DigiCert also has launched DigiCert Labs, an initiative dedicated to researching and developing innovative approaches to security challenges, in collaboration with university researchers and industry leaders.

DigiCert Labs will provide grants to universities to support research into specific challenges related to emerging threats and also collaborate with other enterprise labs. It also will provide large, anonymized data sets to help researchers address real-world use cases.

“DigiCert Labs is focused on collaborating across industry and academia to advance approaches to technology and to bring innovation to market,” Rowley said. “This will include studying post-quantum cryptography, blockchain, machine learning and other technologies that can improve DigiCert’s operations and bring new solutions to the market. New solutions will increase what our partners are able to sell. Post-quantum cryptography, for example, is really important, as the U.S. government and others are predicting that [popular] encryption algorithms may be broken in the next 10 years by quantum computing. DigiCert is working with key researchers to advance post-quantum cryptography solutions, and is the only company in its space with a significant presence in this area.”

DigiCert Labs’ first two research projects involve post-quantum cryptography, working with Microsoft Research, Utimaco, Isara and Gemalto; and machine learning in collaboration with the University of Illinois.

“DigiCert Labs will tackle the biggest challenges of DigiCert customers and the industry at large to drive innovation that will benefit companies today, and well into the future,” said Avesta Hojjati, head of DigiCert Labs. “As part of this work, we will contribute industry-specific expertise and resources to ensure advancements in cyber security technologies and practical solutions to common problems.”