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With about 60,000 employees and a network of 125 manufacturing facilities across 26 countries, ZF develops and manufactures innovative transmissions, steering systems, axels and chassis components for the world’s top vehicle makers. ZF’s primary focus is on continuing its traditions of quality and innovation, but it realizes that success today requires reliance on advanced technology systems to power manufacturing and core business processes.

To secure its systems from internal and external threat, ZF deployed a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) utilizing Microsoft Windows Server 2008 together with Thales HSMs from the nCipher product line, providing a standardized enterprise-wide global infrastructure for certificate-based authentication. Every machine involved in the production of ZF products, be it a server or desktop computer, is authenticated using the digital certificates generated and stored by Thales HSMs. Everything from production to accounting to intellectual property is safeguarded against unauthorized access and no unauthorized machine can eavesdrop on ZF’s manufacturing process.

Using Microsoft Windows Server 2008, digital certificates are issued to every machine on ZF’s network so that each system can be uniquely identified and authorized to access business systems – such as ZF’s SAP accounting platform. This amounts to many thousands of keys and Thales HSMs provide a reliable, auditable and secure hardware key storage environment, underpinning the certificate issuing process. Thales HSMs also provide centralized key management for the many thousands of certificates issued, replacing time-consuming, inefficient manual processes for tracking and updating expiring certificates.