Want to learn the best practice for configuring Chromebooks with 802.1X authentication?

Sign up for a Webinar!

Easy Certificate-Driven Security with Our Managed Cloud Private CA Service

You don’t need to invest hundreds of hours or tens of thousands of dollars on building your own Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). We provide everything you need to deploy your own cloud private certificate authority in less than an hour. Manage all steps of the certificate lifecycle, from issuance to revocation, from one pane of glass.

Easy Certificate-Driven Security with Our Managed Cloud Private CA Service

We’ve Helped Many Businesses Like Yours

  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand
  • Brand

FAQs

What are the benefits of a Public Key Infrastructure for Organizations?

The ultimate benefit of a private PKI is passwordless, certificate-based authentication. It’s no secret that passwords are a vulnerability, with organizations like Microsoft recommending that you move away from password-based PEAP-MSCHAPv2 to passwordless protocols like EAP-TLS. Digital certificates can be used to secure a range of resources, including your wired & wireless network, VPN, applications, desktop logins, and much more.

Additionally, there are benefits for your end-users. With digital certificates, employees no longer have to deal with frustrating password reset policies and disconnects due to password changes.

Why can’t we just build our own Private CA instead?

Many organizations see the benefits of going passwordless, but think that they can reduce the cost of doing so by building their own PKI and private CA. Unfortunately, this often ends up being a costlier venture in terms of finances and time spent. Building a private CA and PKI requires expertise, space for the servers, and regular maintenance. Additionally, certificate management - from certificate issuance to renewal to revocation - is time-consuming.

Private CA solutions like our JoinNow Connector PKI can save you the resources you would otherwise spend on building and maintaining your own. What’s more, since our PKI is cloud-based, your administrators can access it from anywhere without having to replicate it at every office location.

Does your PKI platform provide both public and private certificate authorities?

Our PKI allows you to create a private certificate authority only. However, you can create as many private certificate authorities as you need. Our customers commonly build a different certificate authority for different groups of people to enable role-based access control, such as having a separate certificate authority for their HR and DevOps teams. This makes managing private certificates for different roles organized and efficient.

We also support importing an external certificate authority. If your organization has its own existing private CA from sources such as Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), you can integrate it with our management portal and use our onboarding technologies with it.

What is the purpose of deploying a private CA?

A private CA empowers organizations in certificate issuance for private certificates - or, in other words, certificates that are used internally. Although private certificates can’t be used for external-facing purposes, like code-signing in applications that the public will use, they still greatly enhance the security of your internal resources.

Private certificates enable your administrators to create detailed policies preventing unauthorized devices from accessing your Wi-Fi, VPN, cloud applications, and much more. In order to issue private certificates, however, you first need a private CA.

How does your private CA platform handle certificate lifecycle management phases, such as revocation and renewal?

We wouldn’t be able to call it PKI as a Service if we didn’t provide you everything you needed to manage your private certificates and private CAs. We provide two different technologies to issue certificates. To issue certificates to managed devices, we have our automatic gateway APIs. To issue certificates to unmanaged devices and BYODs, we offer our self-service onboarding technology that empowers end-users to configure their own devices in seconds.


When it comes to revocation, our cloud-based PKI can revoke certificates in a few different ways, including manually and through automatic revocation with some MDMs such as Jamf and Intune. Our private CA service also includes customizable policies you can create, such as non-utilization, which means private certificates that aren’t used for a definable period of time (such as 60 days) are automatically revoked.

What is the passwordless authentication experience like for the end user?

The user experience differs based on whether they are using managed or unmanaged devices/BYODs. For managed devices, the end user will never notice the certificate enrollment process - our private CA service includes gateway APIs that will automatically enroll them for a certificate. For BYODs, you can utilize our self-service onboarding technology, which allows end users to configure their devices for private certificates in a matter of minutes.


After enrollment, certificate-based authentication is mostly the same for either type of end-user. They no longer need to remember a plethora of passwords, reset those passwords regularly, or adhere to complex password requirements.

Can you export the certificate key and use it to authenticate another device?

Public key cryptography requires the use of both a public and private key. While the public key can be sent freely, the private key file must be stored securely, and we take private key storage seriously as a result. The best way to guarantee your private key won’t be removed from your device is to ensure it is stored in the proper key stores and enclaves and set to non-exportable. To increase security further, we recommend that a private key is stored in a device’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM) instead of storing the keys in software.

Which cryptographic algorithms does your Private CA service support?

Our best-in-class PKI supports a range of secure algorithms. Those include RSA 2048 & 4096, as well as SHA-256.