Almost 60 percent reported that their company did not implement PKI, and the remainder did not know whether PKI was in place. Most blame PKI's slow rollout on the complexity of establishing trust models for authentication, the difficulty in integrating with internal applications and the intricacy of managing certificates. PKI implementations often require well over a year, and their total cost of ownership is measured in the millions of dollars. For multicompany PKI initiatives, organizations must also address the complexity resulting from the unique technical and business requirements of their online partners. The PKI problem seems almost intractable in a B2B environment.
Most analysts expect rapid growth in the volume of business transactions flowing over the Internet.
By automating internal processes and then integrating with the processes of customers, suppliers and partners, companies aim to form tight bonds that will improve efficiencies while also enhancing the quality of service to online partners. For companies to bet on this level of integration, they must build these new initiatives on a solid and manageable security platform. And herein lies the dilemma. In the future, many companies will garner the benefits of PKI in their B2B networks by obtaining PKI technology and services as a feature of managed B2B network services. This trend is backed up by IDC, which predicts that, by 2004, two-thirds of PKI revenue will be based on managed services rather than software.