With a new focus on certificate lifecycle automation and with the goal of alleviating workload while reducing outage and security risks, complementary industry initiatives have come together:

  • Increased usage of certificates to identify devices,
  • Change in usage of certificates to more frequent issuance for shorter lifetimes,
  • And the ready availability of DevOps tools and infrastructure,

At the center of this movement is the introduction of readily consumable, cloud-friendly certificate service interfaces that empower IT to connect components from multiple vendors in their delivery of solutions to their business counterparts.

In response, the Entrust Datacard PKI team has developed a new PKI RESTful API implemented in its CA Gateway component, which was recently made generally available. CA Gateway provides a simple RESTful interface to certificate issuance and management functions that enables customers, integrators and alliance partners to develop integrations as we all look to a goal of zero-touch automation that manages certificates from issuance to destruction.

The advantages of REST (Representational State Transfer) interfaces vs. traditional toolkits are well known. The CA Gateway PKI REST API is fully conformant to OpenAPI, is language independent, and is easy to integrate into modern-day and legacy platforms. Furthermore, the CA Gateway component that implements the API is highly available and scalable, using a multi-threaded architecture that can support hundreds of concurrent operations.

If you’ve been contemplating a move to — or to further embrace — a DevOps deployment model, then this is the right time to look at the PKI REST API. It fully supports Certificate Lifecycle Automation today, and we have active, ongoing development of new features that we will be introducing in the coming quarters to support your future business needs.

More information on the PKI REST API and the CA Gateway Component can be found in our recent white paper: