Certificate Lifecycle Management

Manual labor reaches a threshold

One full-time-employee (FTE) can maintain about 40 certificates a week, or 2000 per year, assuming the same employee can do it all. Certificates are valid for one year, and we do not consider interactions between teams or complex testing scenarios.

Your certificate lifecycle processes are missing. It means:

• The certificate ownership details are not captured, or
• Request and Renewal processes of certificates are not defined.

All digital certificates have a limited lifespan and are no longer recognized as valid upon expiration. Certificates needs to be replaced at the end of their life to avoid service disruption and decreased security. If a certificate fails, the vulnerability can be exploited by malicious man-in-the-middle attacks, allowing hackers to gain access to sensitive information. This will not only influence sales, day-to-day business, and brand reputation – but it will also result in a lack of confidence and trust from your customers. However, there are other scenarios where the certificate needs to be replaced/renewed before the expiration date, for example: SHA-1 end of life migration, change in company policy, etc.).

The certificates need to be constantly monitored to ensure that they are effective. The administrators should have controls over approval process of creating/requesting any certificate, just to ensure that no unwanted certificates are added to the system.