How to manage Digital Certificates in a Multi-Cloud environment

In today’s multi-cloud environment, digital certificates are the foundation of secure communication, data protection and maintaining trust across the modern cloud-based infrastructure. These certificates are used by everyone in an organization, whether it is mobile users who need secure connections or IT administrators who want to access systems and applications. As such, many different people will eventually be dealing with certificates on a day-to-day basis – from signing and validating certificates to renewing them before their expiration dates and revoking them when necessary.

As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies to leverage the services provided by different cloud vendors, managing these certificates across a multi-cloud environment can be significantly challenging. Moreover, as much as a multi-cloud or hybrid setup gives the organization a highly available and resilient infrastructure, the on-prem IT team loses control over data security. This could put your organization at a risk that’s not worth taking. 

Complexity of Multi-Cloud Environments 

As organizations move their infrastructure to the cloud, a multi-cloud setup becomes a norm for businesses to comply. According to a report by 451 Research, 98% of organizations using the public cloud have adopted a multi-cloud strategy. This adoption is driven by the improved agility and cost-saving benefits of the cloud demand consumption model.

However, managing such a multi-cloud setup often has its own complexities. Many organizations find themselves overwhelmed by the growing complexity of the infrastructure, and cloud costs take an unexpected turn. Moreover, the ever-growing challenge of managing such infrastructure comes from unutilized resource allocation, and the lack of centralized control worsens the situation.  

With the increase in virtual and physical machines in hybrid setups, digital certificates play a crucial role in enabling authentication and establishing trust across the infrastructure. However, the increase in the sheer number of such certificates across the multi-cloud setup makes tracking and managing them with a manual workflow nearly impossible. The consequences of missing an expiry or mismanaging even a single certificate can have adverse outcomes, leading to disruptions in trust, services, and communication and potentially exposing the infrastructure to vulnerabilities.

The growing complexity highlights the need for automation in Certificate Lifecycle Management. Relying on Spreadsheet and Calendar Alerts for the management of digital certificates is no longer sufficient. Thus, an automated CLM solution needs to be in place to manage all the certificate operations and provide a centralized inventory view across the multi-cloud infrastructure. 

Key Challenges in Certificate Management across Multi-Cloud Environment

Lack of Centralized Visibility

Even with a single cloud vendor scenario, the sheer number of VMs being created and managed daily, it becomes nearly impossible to keep track of digital certificates issued for the machines and services. Now, when it comes to a multi-cloud setup where large organizations utilize different cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP, this problem excels as it becomes tougher to get a clear and centralized view of tracking all these certificates across different cloud environments.  

This lack of visibility and control leads to mismanagement of certificates across the infrastructure, resulting in outages, security flaws, and service outages.

Integrations with External CAs 

Most of the organizations use a combination of private and public certification authorities. However, managing digital certificates from multiple sources, such as Private CAs used for internal systems and services, often helps maintain internal trust across the infrastructure. Private CAs typically maintain a separate certificate inventory, while Public CAs, used for public-facing services, maintain their own independent inventories. 

This fragmented approach makes it difficult to manage the Certification Authorities and raises the risk of inconsistencies and mismanagement of digital certificates.

Delays with Manual Workflows 

In cloud-based infrastructure, most machines are created and managed by automated scripts based on scalability requirements. However, the manual request and approval certificate workflow would delay the process and decrease the efficiency of automated cloud scaling workflows. The delay due to such manual processes results in the usage of an untrusted CA or a self-signed certificate for a service and thus resulting in outages and security flaws. Deploying a self-signed certificate can cause the clients to reject the connection with the service or web server due to trust validation failure. Similarly, using an untrusted CA may cause disruption of critical services like APIs or authentication and lead to downtime.

Compliance And Security Standards

Organizations need to comply with security standards such as HIPAA healthcare, PCI-DSS payment Card industry, and GDPR for personal information protection in the EU. Many industries and regulatory bodies require the use of digital certificates to ensure compliance with security and privacy standards. Abiding by these standards for certificate management involves enforcing strong encryption standards, audits, and stringent access controls. A certificate lifecycle management solution is essential in such cases to uniformly apply these standards across a multi-cloud environment. 

How CertSecure Manager Resolves these Challenges 

Single Pane of Glass 

CertSecure Manager provides complete visibility of all certificates across your multi-cloud/hybrid infrastructure, enabling the management of public as well as private trust. Centralizing the inventory consolidates all the active, expiring, and revoked certificates. Thus, providing a holistic view of certificates to prevent blind spots and monitor certificates effectively. This helps you maintain reports of certificates, along with the necessary information, such as their expiration date, location CA (Certificate Authority), owner, and other metadata.

Certificate Discovery 

CertSecure Manager provides smart discovery capabilities that automatically scan various services from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises systems to find and build inventory for both public and private trust certificates. This proactively detects and resolves expiring, unauthorized, and non-compliant certificates. This helps the business unit and certificate owners plan the certificate renewal for certs nearing expiration and replace certificates with weak or outdated cryptographic standards. 

Public & Private Trust and Third Party Integrations

CertSecure Manager provides a wide range of public and private trust integrations like EJBCA, MSCA, DigiCert, Entrust, and Sectigo. This enables organizations to manage certificates from a central location. It reduces manual management risks, enables quick certificate acquisition, and enforces policies and controls for authorized user requests, enhancing efficiency and security. Moreover, it integrates with third-party applications like Service Now and MS Teams to provide certificate alerts and automate incident management. 

Automation

CertSecure Manager provides automation agents for certificate issuance and deployment at endpoints to establish trust across the infrastructure. It provides automated workflows for web servers like Apache, Tomcat, IIS, and Nginx, and load balancers like F5. It also provides the certificate renewal process with a convenient one-click renewal option. 

Compliance with Security Standards

CerSecure enables certificate issuance and management across all business units with strong PKI policies. This includes specifying and automatically enforcing approved CA templates, crypto algorithms, certificate lifespans, and trust levels. It implements role-based access control (RBAC) to regulate permissions and provide the right level of access to certificates and keys to the right business unit.

Conclusion

Effective Certificate Lifecycle management is the need of the hour. With proposals from Google (365 to 90 days) and Apple (365 to 45 days) to reduce public TLS certificate lifespans, the shift to shorter-lived certificates is coming soon. Relying on manual certificate management isn’t a viable solution anymore.

Moreover, the ever-growing number of certificates across a multi-cloud setup and reliance on easily missed calendar alerts for managing such a huge infrastructure can lead to security breaches, non-compliance, and revenue loss. By addressing the stated challenges with centralized inventory, automation workflows, and certificate discovery, CertSecure Manager efficiently manages certificates across a multi-cloud environment and helps organizations stay one step ahead in certificate lifecycle management.