Certificate management is the act of monitoring, facilitating, and executing digital x.509 certificates. It plays a critical role in keeping communications between a client and server operating, encrypted, and secure.
Certificate management catches faulty, misconfigured, and expired certificates, then performs the following processes:
- Creating
- Purchasing
- Storing
- Disseminating
- Deploying
- Renewing
- Suspending
- Revoking
- Replacing
A good certificate management tool will perform these actions for an entire certificate infrastructure, automatically and in real-time, to prevent downtime and outages.
What are the Benefits of Automated Certificate Management?
As you can imagine, satisfactorily completing the above 8 steps of SSL management is only possible with the right automated certificate management tool. Other benefits that come from the features of such a tool are many:
Operational costs and associated staff time is reduced
- Human errors are eliminated
- Outages are prevented
- Acquisition, deployment, and renewal are streamlined
- Certificates are consolidated and organized
- Data is aggregated
- SSL environments are transparent and controlled
- Accountability is established in accordance with defined policies
- Whole-system health and vulnerability are constantly being checked
- Availability, capability, and scalability are enhanced
- Risk is managed
- Brand reputation is protected
The industry of stolen digital certificates has grown to become the next big underground market. With certificate misuse comes compromised protective capabilities of firewalls and authentication, resulting in data loss and damaged trust. Protecting SSL certificates (and the digital assets they provide) is made significantly easier and stronger with automation. A proper system features compliance enforcement and verification, rapid incident response, and automated remediation. It’s simply impossible to gain any of these benefits without automated certificate management.
Learn more about machine identity security, and how it can benefit your organization!
