Older versions of this protocol became a de facto industrial standard for pragmatic provisioning of digital certificates mostly for network equipment.
The protocol has been designed to make the request and issuing of digital certificates as simple as possible for any standard network user.
[citation needed] It is used, for example, by the Cisco Internetworking Operating System (IOS), though Cisco promotes the Enrollment over Secure Transport (EST), with additional features, and iPhones (iOS) to enroll in enterprise public key infrastructure (PKI).
In 2015, Peter Gutmann revived the Internet Draft due to SCEP widespread use in industry and in other standards.
In September 2020, the draft was published as informational RFC 8894, more than twenty years after the beginning of the standardization effort.