Announcing the Online PKI Assessmental Portal

I am extremely proud to announce that today we have launched our Online PKI Assessment Portal. This new service is the first of its kind to offer online, automated, self-paced review and assessments of Microsoft ADCS based PKIs.

We have been performing onsite PKI Assessments for customers for years now. Typically focused on the design, health, and operations of the PKI – including all aspects of a typical PKI. The assessment is the best way to know the condition of your PKI and areas that need attention or are harboring issues that could cause an outage or cause a security concern.

We have been using automation and tools to collect this data and provide the foundation of the assessment analysis. With this data collection process, we could gather details on a PKI with twelve CAs in less than a few hours and create the base report in as little as five minutes. The same effort if done by manually crawling through all the CAs and capturing data would take a week!

But we faced a dilemma – the logistics of scaling the service to reach around the world and the costs associated with flying to customer sites and performing the assessments just wouldn’t enable us to reach a broader audience. That’s when we realized the tooling we had could be improved and made available for customers directly.

We also had the advantage over our competition as no one else performing assessments does it with any automation or tooling. The tool not only improves our efficiency of data collection, but also offers two things no one else can:

• Automated data collection meant there were no missed details or transcription issues. If you are manually digging through details, you may miss something
• Second, and most importantly, the assessment was objective! Since the tooling looked for the most common problems, we could objectively score and rate a PKI. There is no human element making a subjective opinion on a configuration, setting or condition.

So we set out to rewrite and redesign the assessment process. Through this almost year-long process, we created the Online PKI Assessment Portal. The portal will enable organizations to purchase either individual assessments or a 12-month subscription. Once licensed, you download our ADCS Collector tool to collect details about your PKI. All tools are human-readable PowerShell scripts based on the PSPKI module. This is done to ensure organizations know what we are doing and what we are collecting. You can read our output files as well – all human-readable.

Once collected, the configuration files are uploaded to our portal and within a few moments, your assessment is presented. You will see all the details of your PKI laid out and you will be presented with a Scorecard of your PKI health and recommendations/remediation steps you should take to improve the PKI.

The Portal will provide a snapshot of the report for future reference and is unaffected by changes to the portal. So you can have visibility of trending PKI health and details. Helpful for audit compliance or remediation verification. The online report can also be downloaded in PDF format for review and archive sake as well.

Lastly, we designed this with your data protection in mind. The portal is a fully multi-tenant design with no overlap or exposure between organizations. By default only you will have access to your reports and your uploaded configuration files will be deleted as soon as the report is built.

While it is not nearly as exhaustive as our Advanced Onsite Assessment where we can look at things like physical security, documentation, and CP/CPS compliance – the online portal is looking at the most common issues and configurations that are needed to keep your PKI healthy.

We will continue to update and add new areas to the tool – in fact, we already have a large GitHub of pending enhancements we have had to table until after launch.

The Portal also allows us to significantly lower the cost of a PKI Assessment for customers. Organizations can typically expect to pay $20,000-$30,000 for an onsite assessment.

The Online PKI Assessment Portal is available for purchase and immediate use for your organization. You can purchase individual assessments at $4,995 which is a fraction of the traditional cost. A 12-month subscription is only $12,500 and allows an unlimited number of assessments during the term. As many people will want to do an assessment, remediate the environment and perform a second assessment to verify their changes, the subscription option is a great value for most organizations. Download the Online PKI Assessment Datasheet Learn More/Purchase an Online Assessment