Many Avaya customers have been getting bombarded from many directions recently about PKI’s (and I am not talking about Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)). In this case the PKI’s at issue are Digital Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security certificates, which are used for data encryption on secure communication links in several Avaya products.

By design, security certificates expire after a period of time, requiring system administrators to update them periodically. This advisory from Avaya was intended to notify customers and Avaya Business Partners that many Communication Manager systems worldwide have PKI certificates with an expiration date of March 11, 2009.  A very small number of Application Enablement Services and Modular Messaging systems also have certificates that expire on this same date.

But rather than reaching out to only those customers who had issues, every customer has been getting emails, newsletters and warnings that the sky is falling on March 11th. So hopefully, if you happen to catch this post, you will see that for MOST customers who have Communication Manager, Modular Messaging or AES (Application Enablement Services), this is not an issue.

Information on this page is designed to help determine whether or not the PKI certificate needs to be updated some time before March 11, 2009 and to provide customers, Avaya Business Partners and Avaya Services personnel access to resources and tools to perform any needed updates. (If you do need assistance in determining whether your systems are impacted, feel free to reach out to us and we will help). More information can be found at: http://support.avaya.com/japple/css/japple?PAGE=OpenPage&temp.template.name=PKI_Home.