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What Are the Differences Between SSL Certificate Management and Private Certificate Authority?

Definition

SCM is a platform to centrally manage your Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. Working with trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs) around the word, SCM enables one-stop SSL certificate lifecycle management and helps you improve trust and secure data transmission for your websites. You can also upload local SSL certificates to the platform and manage all certificates in one place.

Private Certificate Authority (PCA) is a private certificate and CA management platform. It allows you to set up a complete CA hierarchy and use it to issue and manage private certificates for your organization. It is used to authenticate application identities and encrypt and decrypt data within your organization.

Differences Between SCM and PCA

Table 1 describes the differences between SCM and PCA.

Table 1 Differences between SCM and PCA

Service Name

Function

Application Scenario

Security Level

Apply to Internal Network

SSL Certificate Manager (SCM)

After an SSL certificate is deployed on a server, HTTPS is enabled on the server. The server uses HTTPS to establish encrypted links to the client, ensuring data transmission security.

  • Authenticate websites and ensure that data is sent to the correct clients and servers.
  • Set up encrypted connections between clients and servers, preventing data from being stolen or tampered with during transmission.
  • Authenticating websites

    Websites can be authenticated with SSL certificates. This effectively prevents the websites from being forged.

  • Authenticating applications

    Cloud and mobile applications can be authenticated with SSL certificates. For example, a wide range of cloud applications, such as CRM, OA, and ERP, can be authenticated to prevent unauthorized access.

  • Encrypting transmission of application data

    Data transmitted between websites/applications and clients can be encrypted with SSL certificates. This effectively ensures data integrity and prevents data from being stolen or tampered with.

High

Not supported. SSL certificates can be used only for public domain names.

PCA
  • Allows you to set up a complete CA hierarchy, including root CAs and multi-level intermediate CAs.
  • Provides high-availability and high-security private CA hosting capabilities.
  • Allow you to create and manage private certificates. These private certificates are used to identify and protect the resources of your organization, including applications, services, devices, and users.
  • Enterprise information digitalization

    A unified certificate management system is established to implement full-lifecycle certificate management. The system integrates with continuous monitoring and automation to prevent risks caused by improper certificate management.

  • IoV

    Telematics Service Providers (TSPs) can use PCA to issue a certificate to each vehicle terminal, thereby providing security capabilities such as authentication and encryption during vehicle-vehicle, vehicle-cloud, and vehicle-road interaction.

  • IoT

    The Internet of Things (IoT) platform can use PCA to issue a certificate to each IoT device to implement IoT device identity verification and authentication, ensuring device access security in IoT scenarios.

Low

Supported. Private certificates can be deployed on the intranet.
Parent topic: Consulting