Company overview
Siemens AG is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. From more resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare, the company creates technology with purpose adding real value for customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers its customers to transform their industries and markets, helping them to transform the everyday for billions of people.
For Siemens AG, trust is everything. Public key infrastructure (PKI) is an essential building block to establishing cryptographical trust across a growing number of its products and enabling an enterprise-wide zero-trust policy. For these reasons, Siemens operates an in-house PKI with Keyfactor EJBCA Enterprise. Due to high efficiency demands, managing manual deployment methods were less and less feasible. By adopting Red Hat Ansible, Siemens automated its entire PKI deployment to reduce time and production cost. Rufus Buschart, head of PKI at Siemens, led the team that oversaw the deployment of the required PKI for each use case across the organization.
Benefits of a fully automated PKI deployment
While organizations can manage PKI deployments manually, doing so is time-consuming and laborious — particularly for large size deployments like Siemens’. Automating these processes saved Buschart’s team time and allowed them to focus on other priorities. He noted that they were able to reduce time spent on the setup and deployment of a system from more than a week to just one day.
The setup process was automated using the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, which enabled Buschart’s team to develop playbooks for the installation, configuration, hardening, and deployment of PKI operations at scale. Buschart explained that relying on the playbooks resulted in significant time savings for his team. He shared the example of setting up a database machine: when completed manually, the workflow required nine detailed steps that the team must execute very carefully. Now, all they must do is run the playbook.