Either by itself or in combination with other related technologies, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology is changing the way government and industry do business. BruckEdwards helps our customers deploy PKI and gain significant operational and business process improvement through the following service offerings.

Strategic Planning

Whether you're building a custom PKI, or leveraging the services of an existing government or industry CA, integrating this service into your enterprise demands close attention to policy, operations, IT integration, and costs. We understand the balance between security, usability and cost, and develop strategies that meet our customer’s business process requirements while optimizing technology and operational factors. Our strategic planning services include:

• PKI Concept of Operations – We help our customers visualize their PKI system implementation and operations by conducting detailed workflow and business process analysis. We assist our clients in developing practical approaches to user enrollment, ongoing certificate management, and for transaction enablement. This approach also enables clients to identify future needs and better understand the gap between “as-is” and “to-be” systems.

• Cost and Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis – PKI costs are not only a function of technology, but are also linked to the security procedures that surround any PKI implementation. These collateral security processes ultimately translate into a “security assurance level.” BruckEdwards cost modeling approach allows customers to quantify and evaluate the impact of security assurance level and other PKI design decisions on both infrastructure and operational costs. Our modeling approach also enables organizations to visualize how future PKI investments should be made consistent with assurance level, availability requirements, and evolving security and cryptographic best practices.

• FIPS 201 – As a result of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12), the federal government is now developing and standardizing methods for user authentication for access to both physical and logical resources. We assist our customers in developing policy and solutions that meet these standards and the deadline for their implementation.

Application Enablement

BruckEdwards understands that mission applications must be the focus of any IT program. We draw on our PKI-enabling experience within the law enforcement and the pharmaceutical industry to develop common sense approaches for leveraging PKI in environments that demand confidentiality, signature, or transaction integrity. Our enablement process involves stakeholders to identify critical requirements, develop comprehensive use case scenarios to document “as-is” and “to-be” processes, and help our customers identify new and innovative business process improvements that become possible through the use of secure electronic transactions. We combine these skills with a comprehensive understanding of the technologies that enable these services, making sure that our customers achieve their goals for increased efficiency and productivity.

Architecture and Design

PKI demands a multi-disciplined IT expertise to ensure that cryptographic services are highly reliable and available to the users and business processes that count on them. We specialize in applying our direct experience with PKI architecture, design, implementation, and operational planning to ensure that our customer’s PKI implementations are successful. We help our customers maximize their E-authentication framework and align it with Federal HSPD-12 requirements.

PKI Operations Support

We combine strong PKI domain expertise and direct experience with CA operation with a core philosophy of Continual Process Improvement to deliver cost effective and highly reliable CA operations services. We measure our performance using our internally developed PKI operations metrics and partner with our customers to improve operational performance and lower costs.

PKI Configuration Management

PKI is not unlike any other complex enterprise infrastructure. It’s more than cryptography. A successful implementation depends on strict attention to detail, and adherence to industry best practices for configuration management, iterative system testing and validation. We bring our foundation system engineering expertise to our PKI engagements, giving our customers the confidence of knowing that we back up our work with the documentation and update processes that PKI demands.

Anti-SPAM solutions

Domain Keys messaging implementations continue to gain momentum and promise to give organizations better control over their internet SPAM by requiring the use of digital signatures from trusted messaging domains. We advise our customers on how to successfully implement this new technology and realize significant operational benefits organization-wide.