Certificate-related outages harm the reliability and availability of vital network systems and services while also being extremely difficult to diagnose and remediate. Unfortunately, the vast majority of businesses routinely suffer from these events, and they are growing more and more costly.
“Recently, a certificate-related outage impacted 32 million cellular customers in the U.K., and estimates suggest this could have cost the company over $100 million,” says Kevin Bocek, vice president, security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi. “Ultimately, companies must get control of all of their certificates; otherwise, it’s simply a matter of time until one expires and causes a debilitating outage.”
Venafi recently conducted a study to see how organizations are responding certificate-related outages on critical business infrastructure. We surveyed over 550 chief information officers (CIOs) from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia and found that outages are likely to become more complicated, common and costly in the future.
Key findings from the study include:
- Almost two-thirds of organizations (60%) experienced certificate-related outages that impacted critical business applications or services within the last year.
- In addition, 74% faced similar events within the last 24 months.
- 85% believe the increasing complexity and interdependence of IT systems will make outages even more painful in the future.
- Nearly 80% estimate certificate use in their organizations will grow by 25% or more in the next five years, with over half anticipating minimum growth rates of more than 50%.
- While 50% of CIOs are concerned that certificate outages will have an impact on customer experience, 45% are more concerned about the time and resources they consume.
CIO Study: Automation Vital to Address Shorter Lifespans and Massive Growth of TLS/SSL Certificates
While humans rely on usernames and passwords to identify themselves and gain authorized access to applications and services, machines use digital certificates to serve as machine identities in order to communicate securely with other machines and gain authorized access to applications and services. Sadly, most organizations do not have a clear understanding of how many machine identities are in use, which devices are using them, and when they will expire. This lack of comprehensive visibility and intelligence leads to outages when under-managed machine identities expire.
“Since certificates control authentication and communication between machines, it is important not to let them expire unexpectedly,” continues Bocek. “And because the symptoms of a machine identity-related outage mimic many other hardware and software failures, diagnosing them is notoriously time-consuming and difficult.”
So how can your organization alleviate the risk of outages? Venafi recommends the following steps
- Discover all certificates. Choose a discovery tool that lets you look across
your entire extended network—including cloud and virtual instances, and CA implementations. This will help you locate every certificate that can impact the reliability and availability of your organization’s critical infrastructure. - Create a complete inventory. Catalog your entire inventory of certificates and store it in a centralized repository where you can track and manage the status of all certificates. This makes it easy to rotate your certificates before they expire.
- Verify security compliance. Investigate certificate properties to ensure that certificates have proper owners, attributes and configurations so all certificates fall into line with your organization’s regular cadence of renewals.
- Continuously monitor certificates. Conduct non-stop surveillance of all certificates so that you’ll know immediately when something isn’t right. This is the most efficient way to keep tabs on renewal requirements, as well as misuse.
- Automate renewals. Eliminate the risk of human error by automating certificate renewals, allowing you to install, configure and validate certificates in seconds. You’ll not only improve availability; you’ll be able to do it in a fraction of the staff hours previously required.
“Overall, CIOs need greater visibility, intelligence and automation of the entire life cycle of all certificates prevent outages,” concludes Bocek.
VIA Venafi: 8 Steps to Stopping Certificate-Related Outages
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