How do you efficiently automate certificates? 

Everyone is aware of the rate at which digital identities are expanding; it is not hard to visualize the numbers we would be dealing with 5-10 years down the line. Given the enormous scale of identities every organization is dealing with currently and the numbers foreseeable in the future, you could easily imagine the bottlenecks for your IT, security, and infrastructure teams in manually managing the certificates representing those identities.  

Also, you might be aware that Google has recently announced a requirement for rotating certificates every 90 days, which implies that manually managing certificate renewals would be challenging and prone to delays. 

Additionally, the risks posed by the rise of quantum computing to existing algorithms would require organizations to be crypto-agile to keep their identity ecosystem safe and secure, requiring quick turnaround cycles for their certificate management operations.  

Looking at all these examples, managing certificates manually is not feasible. Doing so would increase the risk of outages, security threats, and compliance issues for organizations. 

Why certificate automation is important?

To elaborate on why certificate automation is important, we will take a look at the following  key benefits that automation could bring to your organization:  

• Automation provides you with the capability to discover your certificates across your heterogeneous certificate landscape, providing a centralized view. 
• Automation ensures efficient and faster handling of your bulk certificate operations, eliminating any human errors and delays, thus ensuring timely certificate deployments and business continuity 
• Automation helps your organization monitor your certificates for expiration and any compromises or breaches and take proactive action for managing their renewals or revocations respectively, thus eliminating outages and security risks associated with such events 
• Finally, automation helps you in achieving cost optimizations related to avoidance of penalties for non-compliance, fewer incidents outages, and reduction in manual labor 

What to automate? 

Before your organization embarks on a journey to automate various aspects of your certificate management workflows and processes, it is important to consider “what to automate.” Automating the below key areas could be a good starting point :  

Creation, deployment, renewal, and revocation of certificates

One of the major aspects of a certificate automation system is ensuring that certificates are issued, deployed, renewed, and revoked timely to meet an organization’s need for authenticating machines, users, and applications and securing communication among them. 

Automation can ensure effective monitoring of –  

1. Expiring certificates and proactive renewal of certificates without the risk of outages and security threats posed by expired certificates. 
2. Monitoring for any certificate compromises or breaches and ensuring timely revocation of such certificates. 

Certificate discovery 

Certificate discovery should be an integral part of any certificate automation system as it helps your organization understand its certificate usage landscape and helps identify information such as location, certificate lifetimes, creator, user, algorithm, key size, etc. This understanding is important, for example, to identify potential vulnerabilities related to using weak algorithms or non-optimal key sizes and take appropriate remedial action, such as revocation of the certificate, in such scenarios.  

Consolidating your organization’s heterogenous certificate landscape 

Once your certificates are discovered, they typically become part of a certificate inventory that provides a centralized view of your certificates. This would help your organization consolidate the management of certificates from various private and public Certification Authorities as well as manage the other aspects of your PKI. Consolidation would also help your organization enforce standard policies and processes across your heterogeneous certificate landscape, simplifying management, monitoring, control, and reducing costs. 

How could Encryption Consulting help your organization with certificate automation? 

Encryption Consulting’s Certificate Management Solution “CertSecure Manager” is a comprehensive solution for all your digital certificate management requirements, including the following – 

1. Helps consolidate your certificates and provides a unified view across the various certificate authorities registered with CertSecure, including the PKI health information such as certificate utilization, certificate authority expiration, and certificate revocation list expiration. 
2. Provides a centralized view for your expiring certificates, including the ones expiring within 0-7 days, 7-30 days, and so on. This information will help you renew your expired certificates in a timely manner, thus ensuring business continuity. 
3. Gives you a consolidated view of your certificate inventory and allows various filtering options to perform certificate operations such as renewal or revocation easily. 
4. Provides capability for certificate enrolment across the different Certificate authorities registered with CertSecure, as well as managing policies such as configuring certificate templates for various Certificate authorities. 

Conclusion 

Certificate automation is important to mitigate any risks of outages, security breaches, or compliance issues for your organization by streamlining key functions of your certificate management such as issuance, deployment, renewal and revocation.