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"How much would it hurt to implement TLS?" You have to stand up a certificate authority, distribute your internal Root CA cert to all computers, operate a system to refresh certificates every time they expire, and configure every sensitive service and server to use your certs. Or maybe you could hook all the machines up to get and install certificates from Let's Encrypt!. Ultimately, it could cost quite a bit.
– John Deters
Commented Jun 21, 2018 at 18:53
Yes, it costs a HUGE amount to compete with existing commercial providers. It costs very little to set up the software (a couple of hours effort). Deploying across your estate shouldn't cost much - if you have lots of machines then you should have automated deployment tools. Revocation can be a bit tricky - but unlikely to be required on a small scale.
– symcbean
Commented Jun 21, 2018 at 21:02
1

@JohnDeters with some planning, it can be set up quite cheaply or even for free, and with minimal invasiveness, and rolled out incrementally. I built a self-signed CA internally, which means I can add servers as necessary, then distribute a single public key to trust (which can be revoked easily) and all my systems are then running over HTTPS.
– Gargravarr
Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 18:24
2

@Gargravarr, you can do this when your organization is fairly small. But the poster used the phrase "corporate network", which implies a larger number of machines. The ability to successfully manage all of them drops off as the number of machines in the network grows. The overall cost includes handling issues like certificates expiring and how many people will experience an outage when they do. Or the risk of what happens to the company when the one PKI expert leaves, and the boss tries to take over his or her duties and makes a mess of things. That is neither "cheap" nor "free".
– John Deters
Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 18:44
@JohnDeters Except there are ready solution for that. Most corporate networks use for example AD which allows pushing CA certs onto clients. I would expect it to be harder for small organizations where there are more things that are ad-hoc.
– Maja Piechotka
Commented Jun 25, 2018 at 7:18

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