If the answer’s no, you’re not alone. In fact, it’s often difficult to even identify whose job certificate management is within security and IT teams, even in global sized enterprises. Yet if – or when – your certs DO expire, they can cause havoc, exposing you to major cyber security vulnerability, not to mention causing outages that can affect your reputation, efficiency and profit.
So, certificate management matters. Here’s an overview of what you need to know:
Digital Certificates are a cornerstone of modern cyber security, serving as a crucial mechanism for maintaining secure, encrypted communications between an end user and a web server. Certificates play a multifaceted role in the digital landscape, but what specific attributes do they offer?
Certificates act as a digital passport, confirming the legitimacy of a website to visitors. This verification process helps users trust that they are interacting with the intended department and not a fraudulent entity.
Digital certificates facilitate the encryption of data transmitted between the user’s browser and the web server. This encryption ensures that sensitive information, such as personal details or financial data, remains confidential and protected from potential eavesdroppers.
Certificates help maintain the integrity of data during transmission, ensuring that the information sent by the user reaches the server without any tampering or alteration.
The complexity of certificate management is further compounded by the sheer volume and variety of certificates that organisations must oversee. Here are the main types of certificate that you may find in your ecosystem:
Older certificates that may use outdated encryption standards or have been forgotten in obsolete systems.
These secure multiple subdomains under a single domain, offering convenience but potentially increasing risk if compromised.
Used for intranets or internal systems, these are often overlooked in management processes.
Even relatively small teams can find themselves responsible for thousands of certificates, scattered across various systems and applications, so managing them is far from straightforward – which is probably one of the reasons why it’s been widely neglected until recently. To make life even more complicated, each certificate comes with its own set of characteristics and potential challenges:
FullProxy consultants typically implement cert management programmes for our customers using the following 3 steps:
You need to know what certs you have, what types they are and when they expire. You also need to identify non compliant, wildcard or legacy certs that could cause problems at any moment. It’s theoretically possible to do this manually, but practically speaking you’ll achieve a more comprehensive and time-effective result using a cert management tool.
Certificate management tools such as AppViewX provide a quick and comprehensive inventory of all certs across your infrastructure, enabling you to get ahead of expiries, outages and vulnerabilities. Look for a solution with a single pane of glass dashboard to quickly give you full visibility of upcoming renewals plus enable you to manage access privileges and track usage.
Staying on top of cert management effectively without significantly increasing your resource overload or cyber risk, requires automation. With Google and Apple’s forthcoming reduction in cert lifecycles imminent – and doubtless only the first in ever decreasing expiry windows – manually managing certs is likely to become impossible in practice within the next few years. What’s more, with the advent of a post quantum reality also approaching, developing a robust and proactive approach to encryption is a cyber security imperative.
We take certificate management seriously because it directly impacts organisational cyber resilience, IT workload management and quantum readiness. We’ve partnered with AppViewX to offer a comprehensive range of self-serve or fully managed solutions to help you take back control of your certs. Get in touch today to chat with an expert or arrange a free trial.
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