Overview of Private Certificate Application

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

Certificates issued by private CAs are trusted only within your organization but not trusted on the Internet. To use a certificate that is trusted on the Internet, purchase an SSL certificate. For details, see Purchasing an SSL Certificate.

For details, see Figure 1 and Table 1.

Figure 1 Private certificate application procedure

**Table 1** Application procedure
Step	Operation	Description
1	Purchasing a Private CA	Purchase a private CA as required.
2	Activating a Private CA	A private CA instance must be activated before it is used to issue certificates. You can activate the purchased private CA instance as the root CA or subordinate CA. A subordinate private CA takes effect and can be used to issue private certificates only after it is activated.
3	Applying for a Private Certificate	Apply for a private certificate with the activated private CA.
4	Downloading a Private Certificate	After the application is approved, you can download the private certificate and install it on the server.