78% of organizations experienced downtime due to mismanaged encryption

Encryption key and digital certificate inventories are rising, according to a study by Venafi. Poorly managed encryption leads to system downtime, non-compliance and audit failures.

The results of the informal survey include:

• Organizations anticipate a 27% year-over-year certificate and key inventory growth rate
• 85% of organizations manage encryption certificates and private keys manually via spreadsheet and reminder notes
• 78% of organizations have experienced system downtime due to encryption failures in the past 12 months
• 96% of organizations use certificate based server-to-server and/or server-to-client mutual authentication for secure communications inside the firewall
• 71% of organizations have regulatory auditors assessing against private and asymmetric key management.

Encryption has become ubiquitous in today’s IT infrastructure and is a critical element of any security strategy with surging encryption volumes intended to secure communications and reduce vulnerabilities.

When properly managed, encryption ensures against system downtime and failed audits. Yet leading organizations expose themselves to unnecessary risk and outages when encryption keys and certificates are not properly managed.

Without policy-based encryption management in place, system failure and data loss will continue to plague organizations of all sizes and industries with increasing cost and frequency.