In a strategic pivot reflecting India’s rising status as a digital superpower, a global security giant deploys a locally hosted trust platform amid exploding machine identities and a looming quantum computing threat.
As India races toward becoming a $5 trillion economy powered by unprecedented digital scale, DigiCert has made a decisive bet on the country’s technological sovereignty, announcing the launch of a locally hosted version of its flagship DigiCert ONE platform entirely within India.
The announcement, made Thursday in Delhi, positions the global leader in intelligent trust to serve India’s rapidly expanding digital infrastructure while addressing critical data sovereignty requirements that have become increasingly central to the country’s regulatory framework.
“India has long been part of the story of DigiCert,” said James Cook, Group Vice President for Asia Pacific at DigiCert, who noted that over three-quarters of the company’s global engineering talent—more than 350 employees—are already based in India across offices in Bangalore and Pune. “Today, we’re introducing a locally hosted version of DigiCert ONE right here in India, which for us is incredibly exciting.”
The timing is significant. India, now the world’s fourth-largest economy with a $4 trillion GDP, is digitizing at a scale company executives described as “unprecedented.” The country processes 12 billion UPI transactions monthly and has built digital identity infrastructure serving 1.3 billion citizens through Aadhaar, a scale executives called “mind-boggling” and “unparalleled globally.”
But that scale brings extraordinary complexity. Deepika Chauhan, DigiCert’s Chief Product Officer, outlined five converging trends creating what she termed a “significant transformation” in digital trust: explosive growth in machine identities now outnumbering humans 100-to-1 within organizations; industry standards pushing certificate validity periods from one year to just 47 days by 2026; AI-generated content requiring authentication; the looming quantum computing threat to current encryption; and increasingly stringent regulatory compliance requirements.
“Organizations are managing an average of 256,000 certificates,” Chauhan explained, noting that certificate expirations have caused major outages at institutions including the Bank of England, ServiceNow, and Starlink. “When certificate validity is today one year, and by 2029 you need eight times more certificates within a year, you can’t do that unless you’re automating.”
The quantum threat, in particular, represents what Chauhan called a “very real” danger. With the National Institute of Standards and Technology approving the first post-quantum cryptography algorithms in 2024, and Gartner projecting that current encryption will be unsafe by 2029, organizations face a transition, Chauhan said, similar to the decade-long migration from SHA-1 to SHA-2. “If you start doing it when quantum computers are here, you’re already too late because everything will be broken anyway.”
The locally hosted DigiCert ONE platform addresses these challenges while meeting India’s data sovereignty requirements—a capability particularly relevant as regulations proliferate globally on operational resilience, with some requiring organizations to maintain central certificate registries or face penalties for outages.
DigiCert serves 90% of Fortune 500 companies and has seen business in India more than double over the past year across sectors, including banking, financial services, e-commerce, and IT services. The India deployment joins similar sovereign instances in Australia, Europe, Japan, and the United States.
“Digital trust is the foundational infrastructure that glues all of this together,” said Anant Deshpande, Regional Vice President for India & ASEAN. “There can be no digitization, there can be no internet without digital trust.”
