HID Global, a secure identity products solutions company, has planned to help organizations bring people and their Chromebooks back to a hybrid work, classroom environment. This will be done through its HID HydrantID Account Certificate Manager (ACM) digital certificate management offering.

Since March 2020, many organizations have made people work from home and attend school remotely. During which they were given Chromebook laptops, thus increasing its demand at a double rate over the year.

According to the market research firm Canalys, “Chromebooks set record shipment volumes, reaching 11.2 million units in Q4 2020, a remarkable 287% increase over Q4 2019, bringing the full-year 2020 total to 30.6 million units.”

HID HydrantID ACM and its new Chromebook Certificate Enrollment Extension (CEE) feature give power to organizations to issue and manage digital certificates. Thus bringing devices back to physical work and study settings while ensuring they can connect to networks seamlessly and securely without passwords.

“The traditional walled-fortress IT security posture isn’t feasible as we transition to hybrid remote and in-person work and study environments using a growing variety of computing devices and operating systems,” said Mrugesh Chandarana, Senior Product Manager, Commercial CA and PKI Services with HID Global, Identity and Access Management.

He further added, “The huge influx of Chromebooks is here to stay, and HID HydrantID ACM with its CEE feature, is the first solution to provide an easy, cloud-based approach to digital certificate management that enables these devices to authenticate to enterprise networks in a passwordless, Zero Trust network access environment.”

HID HydrantID ACM and the CEE feature together offer automated digital certificate lifecycle management along with tracking, installation, and renewal activity. It facilitates any Chromebook users to make or model to be securely up and running on the network. This can be done by simply plugging in their devices and seamlessly deploying certificates for passwordless authentication without any user intervention.

Initially, a large financial institution with a huge remote workforce and high schools and colleges were the adopters of the HID HydrantID CEE solution for Chromebooks. Later, it noticed a substantial increase in Chromebook usage during the academic year 2020–2021.

CEE feature plays an important role for users due to passwordless authentication while allowing smooth navigation between direct and remote connectivity to the in-office network.

For organizations with no internal Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) infrastructure, the CEE gives them a chance to implement a seamless experience for their users while freeing up Help and\or Service Desk resources.

Implementing the CEE that uses HID HydrantID Managed PKI-as-a-Service lets organizations eliminate operational complexity. It will also dramatically reduce costs related to operating and deploying a private organizational PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).