How do you Automate Certificate Management?

Certificate and machine identity management wasn’t an easy task already, and the constant rise in technologies like cloud services has made the task of certificate and machine identity management even harder than before. Organizations are scaling endlessly, and this makes manual tracking completely unreliable. The guide Automated Certificate Management highlights the challenges faced while managing certificates in an organization and how automation can help reduce the load and make the process smoother.

Why is it difficult to manage certificates?

Now you must be thinking about what exactly is the problem with certificates and why managing them is such a tedious task. The following points sum everything up.

• Manual Tracking:

  The teams working inside an organization resort to ad hoc approaches or approaches that require a lot of human intervention, like using spreadsheets, which makes manual tracking susceptible to errors and requires a lot of effort. Things become even more critical while revoking, reissuing, or requesting certificates, and on the other hand, the number of devices keeps on increasing as the organization upscales. One more major problem with this approach is that it can only track known certificates, and other certificates lying around in a decentralized organization infrastructure cannot be tracked.

• Complex Life Cycle:

  The lifecycle of certificates includes several stages: issuance, revocation, expiration, and renewal. A certificate has to be monitored and managed throughout its life cycle; otherwise, it can cause service outages like the one that Google Voice faced in February 2021 because of an expired TLS certificate.

  You can find similar cases here in which various organizations around the world have faced outages and problems because of a lack of streamlined certificate management. No matter how large or how small an organization is, it is crucial to have a streamlined and centralized certificate management system to avoid such issues.

• Decentralisation Within the Organisation:

  The absence of a centralized certificate management approach in an organization results in the teams adopting and implementing their own methods for certificate management. This leads to inconsistencies in tracking certificates, and the organizations often lose track of how many certificates have been issued and are being monitored. This can create issues like certificate sprawl and various other security vulnerabilities in the organization.

• Lack of Expertise:

  The responsible teams for machine identities often lack the required skills and knowledge in public key infrastructure. Best practices and remediation steps between incidents are often overlooked, which pushes the teams to re-learn, which requires more time and capital investment and hence directly affects the business. Without the use of automated procedures, best practices, and tooling, the organization is in a constant state of dealing with security vulnerabilities that affect the efficiency of the organization.

How does Certificate Automation help?

Now that you are aware of the challenges faced while managing certificates, certificate automation can smoothen up the process of certificate and machine identity management by using tools and procedures and ensuring that the organization uses a single centralized solution for the problem; this results in better monitoring and management along with less human intervention, which further reduces the chances of leaving any vulnerabilities and, in return, reduces cost and increases efficiency.

• Centralized Management and Scalability:

  An organization can enforce centralized management of certificates by using a certificate automation tool that transfers complete control of all the certificates to a single platform, simplifying the process of monitoring and managing the certificates regardless of their origin. This also significantly improves scalability; as the organization grows and more certificates are to be dealt with, a centralized system adjusts to the changes easily as compared to other approaches.

• Automated Certificate Lifecycle and Monitoring:

  This consists of monitoring the certificates throughout their life cycles and automating procedures such as renewal to minimize human intervention, which further reduces the chances of error. The certificate renewal process is a task demanding constant monitoring and quick response or, as stated earlier, could lead to outages and other related issues.

  Thus, automating such procedures ensures that the responsible teams are notified on time and not after the certificate has expired. Automating the certificate lifecycle also prevents loss of availability while maintaining a detailed log of certificate compliance.

• Automated Certificate Discovery:

  Certificate discovery is an important step that involves discovering all the existing certificates in the infrastructure that are to be monitored and maintained. Automating this process eliminates the possibility of leaving any certificate untracked or unmanaged and ensures that the organization understands the full scope of its certificate usage. Manual certificate discovery is susceptible to errors as it requires human intervention. Thus, automating certificate discovery and management results in a more secure and robust public key infrastructure.

• Business and Cost Savings:

  The problems that arise because of poor certificate management practices not only cost the organisation time and operational burden but also a significant amount of capital investment, which directly affects company expenses, the business, and, ultimately, its reputation. Such expensive mishaps can be prevented by certificate automation, which ensures smooth and secure operations. Additionally, certificate automation directly reduces operational burdens, which helps the teams focus on their respective primary tasks. This improves the overall efficiency of the teams and results in better outputs.

Adopting Certificate Automation

The adoption of certificate automation is not just a one-time process but one that requires constant and progressive steps toward it. The following steps simplify the entire process:

1. Assessing current certificate management practices:

   The discovery of all the certificates existing in the infrastructure is the first task under this step. Once done, an analysis of any existing issues and misconfigurations is performed, and the organization’s certificate policies and CAs in use are reviewed.

2. Choosing a CA and an automation tool:

   After the assessment is performed, it is time to choose a trusted certificate authority that fully supports automated issuance and renewal. For example, DigiCert, Sectigo, etc. Now, you should start considering automation tools and platforms for certificate lifecycle management. You can choose among loads of solutions available according to your organization’s needs and preferences.

3. Deploying certificate automation infrastructure:

   According to your requirements, install and configure the adequate automation tools.

   If the organization uses an internal PKI, make sure that these tools can request certificates from your internal certificate authority.

4. Automating certificate issuance and renewal:

   This step involves setting up the automation tool to communicate with your CA via CA’s APIs or the ACME protocol allows automated requests for new certificates, automatic validation, and reissuance. Depending on your CA, you have to configure automated domain validation for public certificates or policy-based issuance for internal certificates. Also, ensure that the tool is configured to renew certificates before they expire (usually before 30 days).

5. Automating certificate distribution and deployment:

   Now, it is time to automate the deployment of new and renewed certificates to the servers. Tools like Ansible, Puppet, etc., can be used. If you opt for Kubernetes, CertManager can be configured to automatically request, renew, and issue certificates for services within your cluster.

6. Monitoring and auditing:

   Monitoring and auditing can be done using tools to track the status of certificates, upcoming renewals, and failures. You can use multiple monitoring platforms that can integrate with certificate automation tools easily. Ensure that certificate issuance, renewals, and failures are logged for compliance and auditing purposes.

7. Managing revocations and rotations:

   Ensure that compromised or unused certificates are revoked promptly using the CA’s API or the ACME protocol; many automation tools support automated revocation using direct API calls. Accordingly, rotate certificates and keys as part of your security policy and automate the key rotation process to ensure the security of sensitive services.

8. Training and documentation:

   Now, it is the time to educate and train the operation teams in your organization on the tools that are being used for automation and how to handle exceptions and troubleshooting. It is also strongly advised to maintain detailed documentation consisting of a complete setup, including configurations and key contacts, and ensure regular updates of the documentation.

9. Ongoing optimization:

   This is an everlasting process that consists of scaling your certificate automation solution to cover new services, applications, and environments. Regular review and auditing of the security of your certificate management practices to ensure compliance with internal policies and regulations is also an important step.

Conclusion

As organizations are upscaling endlessly, managing certificates and machine identities becomes more challenging. Manual methods that were once effective are now prone to mistakes and inefficiencies. Automating certificate management helps businesses simplify operations, reduce workload, and enhance security. It allows centralized control, automates key processes, and ensures no certificate is overlooked.

This reduces the risk of service disruptions, lowers costs, and improves team efficiency. In today’s rapidly advancing tech environment, automating certificate management is essential for maintaining a secure and scalable infrastructure.