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GlobalSign Able to Issue Thousands of Certificates Per Second

GlobalSign Able to Issue Thousands of Certificates Per Second

This is the blog post I have been waiting to write since joining GlobalSign. It is my privilege to announce that, after two years in the making, our Managed Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Platform is now available as a commercial service.

It started in late 2014 in our Kent UK office with the belief that PKI could be done better. Three months later our first PoC had issued a hundred million certificates at rates of a few tens per second. By the end of 2015 we reached a billion at rates of a few hundred per second with dual datacenter fail-over. In December 2016 we had several billion issued certificates at rates of thousands per second with multiple datacenter fail-over options provided by our horizontally scalable architecture.

We have reached a turning point where manufactures and integrators of SCADA systems, smart home appliances and consumer electronics, network core and customer premises equipment can easily create unique identities for their devices and mesh them into a trusted communication model. PKI has traditionally had a steep learning curve that has slowed down its adoption. Our new platform effectively commoditizes identity and security between devices by setting the bar of admission much lower in terms of both ease of use and service responsiveness.

These qualities have received much praise from early adopters of our new system. One of them is Beame.io, who have built an incredible mobile end to end encryption service tailored for end users.

Although there is so much to look back on, this is only the beginning. We will continue working with our partners from the Trusted Computing Group in the years to come to build simpler and better integration bridges to enrich the PKI ecosystem that we envision with even more products and services. We are going to simultaneously port over features from our existing PKI offering, such as automated domain vetting for SSL Certificates and a much simpler and faster document signing service.

We are not only extremely proud of the world record breaking performance we have achieved, but also the innovation, engineering discipline and technical acumen this endeavor has added to the company. I would like to personally thank everyone at GlobalSign involved, with a special mention going to our extraordinarily talented engineering group in London, that has grown along with the project into the best team anyone could ever wish for.

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