The study, which took in responses from more than 150 businesses, found that organisations are anticipating a 27% year-over-year certificate and key inventory growth rate.
In addition, 85% of organisations reported they actually have to manage their encryption certificates and private keys manually via spreadsheet and reminder notes.
According to Venafi, the automated encryption management specialist, the data confirms what the company has seen for some time on its client's computer systems, and concludes that the problem is related to the explosion of certificate-based encryption deployments over the last year or so.
Paul Turner, the firm's vice president of product and customer solutions, said that almost every IT system and application relies on SSL certificates for trusted communications – including device and user authentication – in an effort to connect systems and users to the infrastructure securely.
"The result is that large enterprises are faced with the prospect of deploying and manually managing thousands and, in some cases, tens of thousands of certificates of keys", he explained.
Delving into the study – entitled `Security and Availability: SSL Certificate and Key Management' – reveals that 71% of organisations have had regulatory auditors assessing their systems against private and asymmetric key management.
And the conclusions of the report?
Without policy-based encryption management in place, system failure and data losses will, says Venafi, continue to plague organisations of all sizes and industries with increasing cost and frequency.