EXTOL HSM INTEGRATION CERTIFICATION

THE BENEFIT OF INDEPENDANT TESTING - EXTOL

1. Reduce Capex deployment costs – Expensive vendor or third party (SI) Professional Services or contract resources paid hourly or daily spend sometimes weeks or months from demo / POC integration to Production deployment, with supporting documentation and relevant training adding to the overall spend. HSM user capex costs are lowered significantly thanks to bullet proof integration documents with guaranteed interoperability between HSM model and precise version of HSM software, firmware and integration application. Estimate at least £10K+ saving, with potential savings north of £100K or sometimes £1M depending on project and integration circumstances. 

2. Reduce Opex TCO for HSM and application ownership – Skills often very niche held by a few individuals within a business with vendor or SI PS often leveraged for HSM software, firmware or integration application upgrades. Often risks not fully understood by business, and bizarre integration issues caused by upgrades require lengthy and expensive troubleshooting processes which can be mitigated by clear and concise Extol documentation repository. 

3. Independent vendor neutral comprehensive integration testing – Integrations between a HSM and application is often limited in scope and under very specific test conditions with precise versions of hardware, firmware and software. With Extol each integration is either conducted and certified manually by an Extol Integration Specialist, or where automation is leveraged the results are individually checked and verified by an Extol Integration Specialist to guarantee the quality of integration and feature operation.

4. Vendors often outsource integrations to countries like India where very specific use cases and precise versions are leveraged, rather than testing the full suite of versions, features and configuration options available by either the HSM or integration application such as. FIPS 140-2 L3 modes, specific algorithms or key sizes, versions of libraries like CNG, Java, Enterprise Java, PKCS#11 as well as obscure features not commonly used so often ignored until large account requires them, i.e. soft cards, fail-back, obscure / specialist cipher suites, FIPS mode, infra as code / CLI-only integration. Upgrading firmware, software and applications should be a risk-free no-brainer 100% of the time, and not require significant time and cost testing until you’ve dotted every i and crossed every t. 

5. Build confidence in leveraged security solutions – Increasing confidence in security solutions, whether they be hardware or software is vital, especially at board level as it is the board which ultimately approve a business’s security budget for the financial year. By having a solution or technology Extol certified this confidence can be increased, which means security conscious businesses will spending more, therefore increasing the global security posture of all businesses.

6. Higher sales for HSM vendors – By improving on the benefits above, this will ultimately lead to more sales of HSMs, improving the bottom-line for HSM vendors.