Siemens AG is, with its 295.000 employees, a global technology powerhouse that brings together the digital and physical worlds to benefit society, customers, and shareholders. The company focuses on intelligent infrastructure for buildings and decentralized energy systems, automation and digitalization in the process, manufacturing industries, and smart mobility solutions for rail and road transport.
For Siemens, it has always been important to provide highly secure and trusted certificates to all its employees and many business partners worldwide. Public key infrastructure (PKI) is deeply integrated into Siemens with the company building and operating an in-house solution for over 20 years. Siemens made the decision to replace this internal application, including the card management system, with an advanced solution from Nexus. "Siemens PKI is one of the cornerstones of our company's security infrastructure," says Markus Wichmann, Service Owner for Siemens PKI. “The certificate management solution at Siemens is a core function that implements automation and ensures the right level of assurance for issued identities,” says Rufus Buschart, Head of Cryptographic Technologies Delivery at Siemens and responsible for the operation of Siemens PKI.
As a key element in securing the continued digitalization, Siemens Public Key Infrastructure is provided by Siemens Cybersecurity Infrastructure and operated by Siemens Cryptographic Technologies Delivery. Siemens PKI is acting as the global trust service provider (TSP) delivering PKI services to 295.000 employees at Siemens, 91.000 employees at Siemens Energy and in addition 100.000 users from the company’s business partners. “The PKI certificates we issue are a critical part of all our employees’ normal way of working and integrated into IT infrastructure. At Siemens, the use cases for PKI certificates span from workstation logon, securing emails to electronic signatures,” continues Mr. Buschart.
It was a very challenging project in many aspects. Nexus was under much pressure to deliver according to the high PKI industry standards. In order to get the new solution in place, a long, intense and close cooperation was needed. “Taking on the Siemens PKI project was not an easy task, and it put our solution to the test. However, to continue to be innovative and forward-thinking, projects such as this, push us to grow and improve even further. The joint, trustful collaboration between two expert teams enabled the delivery of a highly secure and technologically advanced PKI solution that both companies can be proud of," adds Olivier Dussutour, CEO at Nexus and Director of IN Groupe's Workforce ID business line.
In addition to providing global services around the traditional smart cards that are used as corporate badges, Siemens PKI is expanding its options around trusted identities. Now support for complementary certificates form factors is being implemented. “The need for an additional and smooth way for our employees to digitize collaboration processes while still remaining in sync with our high information security standards has been present for a while now. Smart cards are great, and we will continue to use them as our trust anchor for our employees, but it was important that the new system is prepared for the rollout of other form factors, for example, mobile virtual smart cards,” explains Mr. Buschart.
Nexus, the Workforce ID brand of IN Groupe, is a proud supplier of the Smart ID platform securing the full lifecycle management and self-service functionalities around both physical and digital identities for Siemens.
Published
21/02 2022
About Siemens
Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) 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 the purpose of adding real value for customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers its customers to transform their industries and markets, to transform every day for billions of people.
Siemens also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, a globally leading medical technology provider shaping the future of healthcare. In addition, Siemens holds a minority stake in Siemens Energy, a global leader in the transmission and generation of electrical power. In fiscal 2020, which ended on September 30, 2020, the Siemens Group generated revenue of €55.3 billion and net income of €4.2 billion. As of September 30, 2020, the company had around 293,000 employees worldwide.
Do you want to learn more about this and other projects?