Certificate managementis the act of monitoring, facilitating, and executing digital x.509 certificates (SSL certificates). It plays a critical role in keeping communications between a client and server operating, encrypted, and secure. Certificate lifecycle management catches faulty, misconfigured, and expired certificates, thenperforms the following processes: A good certificate lifecycle management system can perform these actions for an entire certificate infrastructure, automatically and in real-time, toprevent downtime and outages.What is Certificate Management?
The digital certificate definition is basically the same as the definition of an SSL certificate. That is, SSL certificates are digital documents that verify ownership of a public key (signature) to ensure confidentiality and security when information is exchanged between a user’s browser and the web server. If the certificate is valid, then the HTTP changes to HTTPS and all connections will remain private. Certificates work by performing the following processes when a browser requests to connect to a secure web server: This system works very well unless there is a problem with a certificate. Certificates expire after a predefined duration (generally between 3 months and 2 years) and policies are continually being changed. This means there is a constant need for renewal and sometimes suspension, revocation, or replacement of certificates. Otherwise, browsers won’t trust the legitimacy of a website and will send error messages. Another problem is that illegitimate certificates can open the door to security breaches. Thus, the need to really take to heart the importance of SSL certificate managers.What is a Digital Certificate?
Just like passwords or other credentials, digital certificates go through a cycle from creation to revocation/renewal. For security reasons, they aren't simply issued and then remain forever in the infrastructure. They are only valid for a limited time before they expire. The lifecycle of digital certificate management is:What is Certificate Lifecycle Management?
To ward off any problems, establishing SSL certificate management is a must. There are two ways to go about doing this: a manual system or an automated one.What are Certificate Lifecycle Management Systems?
Manually managing certificates involves using a calendar or spreadsheet to keep track of every detail of each SSL certificate, including policy changes, any required actions, and expiration dates. This may be manageable if you are a very small business with maybe a dozen certificates to oversee. But, as your business grows and becomes more complex, those dozen certificates can quickly turn into hundreds, each with its own issuer, policies, effectiveness, vulnerabilities, and expiration date. Keeping on top of such volume becomes time consuming, burdensome, error-prone, and risky. A simple missed deadline or typo can prove costly with a breakdown or breach that causes lost traffic, sales, data, and trust.What is Manual Certificate Management?
By far, the safest, easiest way to manage certificates is by employing an automated certificate management system. SSL certificate managerswill conquer all the critical tasks for you without any hiccups or hangups. The 8 steps automatically covered by such a system are:How Does Automated Certificate Management Work?
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: Sincesecurity of SSL certificatesis such a big deal and a huge benefit that comes with using a dedicated certificate lifecycle management tool, let’s go into this subject a bit more. The industry ofstolen digital certificateshas 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) from cyber-attacks are made significantly easier and stronger with the automation of certificate generation and authentication. A proper system features compliance enforcement and verification, rapid incident response, and automated remediation. It’s simply impossible to gain any of these benefits unless an automated certificate management system is employed.What are the Benefits of Automated Certificate Management?
Now that you know what certificate management is, you also know the key takeaways are that it is: 1) necessary, and 2) nearly impossible to do well without a professional certificate management system. Learn more aboutSSL certificates, DevOps, SSH Keys, Code Signing, and more inVenafi’s free Education Center! Or get started immediately,start a 30 day free trial of TLS Protect Cloud. Free Trial Start nowVenafi Certificate Management
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