Digital certificate and security vendor Comodo has signed a strategic partnership with German domain hosting company Key-Systems GmbH. The deal will see Key-Systems offering Comodo SSL/TLS certificates to its domain and hosting customers. With over 4 million customers of whom around 2.5% are retail/corporate entities this is a big deal for Comodo.
Michael Fowler, Comodo president said: “Together, Comodo and Key-Systems are creating new and innovative ways to secure websites that are easy to implement and fully automated so that customers can focus on their core business. The partnership allows customers to benefit with our market-leading security solutions that will be included with Key-Systems offerings and supported by local experts.”
Why does this matter?
Browser vendors such as Google are cracking down on how companies move data between customers and their sites. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) ensures that there is an encrypted link between a browser and a website. This helps to prevent hackers stealing data as it moves across the network. For a while this used to be of importance mainly to those sites doing eCommerce.
Earlier this year Google made it clear that no support for SSL would lower a sites ranking. This created a rush by site owners to get SSL certificates. It caused a problem. Some of the SSL certificate vendors were caught out with poor processes. Security giant Symantec was one of them. After a very public spat with Google, Symantec sold its entire SSL certificate business unit to DigiCert.
This deal by Comodo is good business for it and potentially for its partner Key-Systems. Comodo is already rated by most analysts and market watchers as the biggest provider of SSL certificates globally. In 2016 it held 40% of the market. While the DigiCert acquisition of the Symantec business will improve its share it is still some way off of Comodo.
For customers of Key-Systems, this deal should make it much easier to add digital certificates to their domain. As customers with existing certificates come up for renewal it will be interesting to see if Key-Systems persuades them to move to a Comodo certificate. If it does then expect to see a bump in Comodo’s market share by the end of 2017.
