International. During 2020, organizations around the world sent home an unprecedented number of people to work and study remotely. Many of these people had Chromebook laptops, whose shipments have been more than doubling year after year.
HID Global announced that it is helping organizations bring these people back to their facilities, in hybrid work and study environments, through its solution for the management of digital certificates ACM (account certificate manager) of HID HydrantID.
According to market research firm Canalys, "Chromebooks recorded record shipment volumes reaching 11.2 million units in the fourth quarter of 2020, a notable increase of 287% over the fourth quarter of 2019, bringing the full year 2020 total to 30.6 million units." HID HydrantID's ACM and its new CEE (Chromebook Certificate Registration Extension) feature allows organizations to issue and manage digital certificates to bring these devices back into physical work and study environments, ensuring they can connect to networks quickly, securely, and without passwords.
"The level of traditional IT security, as a walled fortress, is not plausible in the process of transitioning to hybrid work-study environments, which combine remote and face-to-face access, and in which an increasing variety of computing devices and operating systems are used," said Mrugesh Chandarana, senior product manager for Identity and Access Management at HID Global. "The huge influx of Chromebooks is here to stay and HID HydrantID ACM with its CEE feature is the first technology to offer a simple, cloud-based solution for digital certificate management that allows these devices to be authenticated on corporate networks in a networked access environment, without passwords and with a strict reliability verification process."
HID HydrantID ACM, with its CEE function, allows an automated management of the life cycle of digital certificates, which can be tracked, installed and renewed once they have been issued. Also, thanks to this solution, users of any make or model of Chromebook can safely use the network, simply by connecting their devices and quickly implementing certificates to perform authentication without password and without the intervention of users. Among the pioneers in the use of the HID HydrantID CEE solution for Chromebooks is a large financial institution with a considerable number of remote employees, as well as high schools and universities where Chromebook usage grew considerably during the 2020/2021 academic year.
The CEE feature is especially valuable for users, as it allows them to perform passwordless authentication and, likewise, seamlessly oscillate between remote connectivity and direct connection to the workplace network. For organizations that do not have an internal Microsot Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) infrastructure, CEE enables them to deliver an optimal experience for their users while freeing up level 1 and 2 support resources (help/service desk). By implementing the CEE function through HID HydrantID's PKI as a managed service, organizations eliminate operational complexity and dramatically reduce the costs associated with operating and implementing a private organizational PKI.
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