Virtual Registration Authority: PKI Cloud SaaS solution

Let’s first go back and clarify what is a registration authority. You can check registration authority term in our documentation section, and briefly it is an intermediate entity to handle user requests for certificates. Usually, in all commercial solutions Registration Authority (further, RA) is a part of a solution together with Certificate Authority. They serve to handle more user related tasks like user management (user data mostly, names, departments and etc.), request management (generating, declining, approving requests for X.509 certificates) and certificate management (like approving, revoking, postponing certificates and etc). In such case Certificate Authority can do the only thing it is supposed to do – issue/revoke certificates, leaving all management functions to Registration Authorities.
This is how the scheme for three offices with a need for the fourth office RA looks like:

Above the infrastructure is planned and rolled out by specialists, and adding new RA is not an easy and fast task. To organize such scheme a company should find a PKI solution provider, order servers, software and etc. It means now you begin to owe this infrastructure, and you need to sign the agreement for the technical support and etc, or try to support it yourself hiring specialists. And also usually installing PKI infrastructure is a long process, and involves hiring vendor specialists for installation, software configurations, setup and tests. This also includes the installation and the configuration of Registration Authorities. But at the end above company’s task was only to secure emails and enable digital signatures. Even this task will require many complicated and costly steps.

Development of cloud solutions opened a new door for cost saving while maintaining efficient infrastructure. Cloud solutions present different types of the infrastructure, you can order Platform-as-a-Service type of the solution, which basically means you will have servers at your disposal, so called processing power. Another type is Software-as-a-Service, which allows to move functions to the cloud. The great example is salesforce.com which allows you to control your sales processes without the need to roll-out a software for this. You just order functionalities from the website (rent a software), and you immediately get the access and you can start working right now.

SaaS cloud offers a great possibility for end clients to concentrate their operations on their core business while having all software support needed to fulfill business operations.

Our Virtual Registration Authority follows the same path – you pay a fee for renting it and you immediately get Registration Authority functions for rolling your PKI infrastructure in several clicks. You skip all installation, configuration and maintenance steps, and get immediately into real functionalities.

If you seek only for security of your emails, digital signatures of your documents, your code, and you want to save costs cloud solutions are the best way to manage this. Virtual RA gives you all functionality you need to roll-out certificates for your users in best and cost-efficient manner. Try it yourself in a demo to see how our cloud PKI SaaS solution works in real-life.