How Mature Is Your PKI? Find Out the Smart Way with the PKI Maturity Model

Assess. Improve. Future-Proof Your PKI Strategy

The Need to Give Legacy PKI a Serious Makeover

From securing communications and authenticating users to ensuring data integrity, Public key infrastructure (PKI) plays a vital role in keeping today’s organizations secure and trusted. While its importance is clear, deploying and managing PKI effectively is anything but straightforward.

For many organizations, PKI is still a patchwork of legacy systems, manual processes, scattered certificate inventories, and growing complexity. Combine that with a shortage of skilled PKI experts and a lack of automation, and it’s no surprise that outages, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues keep surfacing.

Further, as IT environments evolve and change—with multi-cloud, DevOps, IoT, and the looming shift to post-quantum cryptography—traditional PKI setups are being pushed to their limits. Without the right processes, tools, and people in place, PKI can quickly become a bottleneck—or worse, a serious cybersecurity risk.

What’s needed to move past these challenges is a more strategic and structured approach to PKI. That’s where the PKI Maturity Model (PKIMM) comes in—a framework from the PKI Consortium that helps organizations assess their current PKI setup, identify gaps, and build a stronger, more resilient PKI for the future.

What is the PKI Maturity Model?

The PKI Maturity Model is a comprehensive and practical framework designed to help organizations assess how well their PKI is working—and where it needs improvement. It provides PKI and Security teams a way to step back, evaluate, and enhance their PKI maturity in a structured way.

Whether you’re running a lean team or managing PKI for a global enterprise, the PKI maturity model is applicable to all types of organizations—no matter the industry or use case.

Here’s what the PKI Maturity Model helps you with:

• Assessment: Quickly understand the current state of your PKI—its capabilities, gaps, and performance.
• Benchmarking: Compare your PKI maturity (confidentially and anonymously) with that of similar organizations by size or sector.
• Guidance: Get clear, actionable recommendations on how to strengthen your PKI strategy and capabilities.
• Improvement: Implement best practices to elevate overall PKI performance

What Does the PKI Maturity Model Measure and What It Means?

The PKI Maturity Model breaks things down into five clearly defined maturity levels—kind of like an audit scorecard for your PKI. Each level reflects how structured, consistent, and forward-looking your PKI practices are and the risks that come with where you currently stand.

Maturity levels:

1. Initial: Processes are ad-hoc. No inventory is available. Controls are poor and purely reactive.
2. Basic: Some structure exists but lacks alignment with industry standards and regulations. Inventory is not maintained. Controls are still mostly reactive.
3. Advanced: Certificate management processes and controls are in place but not fully followed and understood. Certificate inventory is maintained. Controls are more proactive.
4. Managed: Certificate management processes are well-designed, measured, and consistently applied. Certificate inventory is up to date. Controls are proactive.
5. Optimized: Certificate management processes are well designed and followed. Inventory is complete and updated through regular certificate discovery. Certificate management is integrated with organizational governance. Controls are proactive by design. Continuous improvement is the norm.

However, these levels aren’t assessed in isolation. The model examines your PKI across four key modules that encompass all PKI dimensions: Governance, Management, Operations, and Resources. Each module includes a set of specific categories you’ll be scored on.

The Four Modules and the Associated Categories:

• Governance: Evaluates strategy and vision, policies and documentation, compliance, and processes and procedures.
• Management: Evaluates key management, certificate management, infrastructure management, and change management and agility.
• Operations: Evaluates resilience, automation, interoperability, and monitoring and auditing.
• Resources: Evaluates sourcing, knowledge and training, and awareness.

Together, these modules and their 15 categories, covering all the essential aspects—people, processes, and technology—provide a well-rounded view of your PKI, from high-level governance to hands-on operations and team readiness.

To simplify the assessment process, the PKI Consortium offers a straightforward, Excel-based assessment tool. It guides you through defining the scope of your environment, scoring each category, and generating a report that shows your maturity levels and areas for improvement. This structured process ensures consistent and repeatable evaluations, unlike scattered and ad-hoc self-assessments.

What Maturity Looks Like in Key PKI Categories?

The PKI Maturity Model dives deep into all aspects of PKI, but a few categories stand out for their significant impact. Here’s a quick look at what low and high maturity look like in each—and what the model evaluates.

1. Policies and Documentation

Well-defined policies and security measures are vital for successful PKI management. This model checks how well your PKI is governed—whether your rules, roles, and procedures are clearly defined and consistently applied.

• Low Maturity: No formal policies, unclear ownership, and inconsistent practices.
• High Maturity: Well-documented, enforced, and regularly updated policies that guide operations and ensure accountability.

2. Certificate Management

This is where everything comes together. The model looks at how you discover, inventory, and profile certificates throughout the organization. It also examines how you issue, renew, revoke, and provision certificates.

• Low Maturity: Ad-hoc certificate tracking, incomplete inventory, and manual processes.
• High Maturity: Regular certificate discovery, up-to-date inventory, full lifecycle automation, and well-documented policies. Certificate management is integrated with organizational governance.

3. Change Management and Agility

PKI should evolve with your business and the broader security landscape. The model looks for robust and reliable change management processes that enable swift transitions without disrupting operations.

• Low Maturity: Unplanned and ad-hoc changes, no formal process, no consideration for agility, and high risk of disruption.
• High Maturity: Change management and agility are built into the process—clearly documented processes, roles, responsibilities, and tools and technologies are used for smooth change management.

4. Automation

Automation is one of the proven ways to enhance PKI efficiency and minimize human error. The model assesses the extent of automation in certificate lifecycle management.

• Low Maturity: The entire certificate lifecycle is managed manually
• High Maturity: Certificate operations are fully automated, governed by clear policies, and continuously monitored and audited for performance and compliance.

5. Monitoring and Auditing

Visibility drives control. In this category, the model examines whether you have the necessary controls in place to detect issues, respond to threats, and maintain compliance.

• Low Maturity: No logs or records to monitor and audit security events

• High Maturity: Detailed audit logs and monitoring systems that are regularly reviewed, and refined. Alerts flag critical events so you always know what’s happening across your PKI.

Getting to higher maturity across these categories doesn’t happen overnight—but knowing where you stand is the first step. And with the PKI Maturity Model as your guide, you can move forward with a plan that’s built on structure, insight, and best practices.

Next Steps: Power Your PKI Maturity Journey with AppViewX AVX ONE

Building PKI maturity is a journey, and modern PKI and CLM solutions can help you leap ahead by replacing complexity with speed, scale, and agility.

The AppViewX AVX ONE Platform is built to simplify and modernize PKI and certificate lifecycle management. It combines powerful certificate lifecycle management automation (AVX ONE CLM) with private PKI-as-a-Service (AVX ONE PKIaaS), giving you complete visibility and centralized control over all private and public certificates across your hybrid multi-cloud, containerized, and IoT environments.

AVX ONE CLM simplifies certificate lifecycle management with complete visibility, end-to-end automation, and continuous policy control and governance of digital certificates and keys. AVX ONE PKIaaS simplifies and modernizes private PKI management. You can quickly and securely set up fully compliant private CAs and start issuing certificates within minutes—no hardware to buy, no complex infrastructure to maintain.

Together, they help eliminate outages, mitigate security risks, ensure compliance, and build crypto-agility–all of which directly boost your PKI maturity.

Ready to level up your PKI and CLM? Use the PKI Maturity Model as your roadmap and let AppViewX AVX ONE be the engine that drives you to a secure, resilient, and future-ready PKI.

Check out AppViewX AVX ONE Platform, request a demo, or talk to one of our experts today.