Certificate expiration doesn’t send a calendar invite. It just takes your applications offline.
For organizations running F5 BIG-IP within the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP), SSL/TLS certificate management has long been one of the most manual and most dangerous items on the security team’s checklist. Today, that changes. Encryption Consulting has partnered with F5, and as a partner in the F5 ADSP Partner Program, we’ve built an integration that brings true zero-touch certificate lifecycle orchestration to your F5 BIG-IP environment.
Backed by industry-leading expertise, the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) is designed to deliver and secure every app and API. Our Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution, CertSecure Manager Orchestrator for F5, integrates with that platform to orchestrate the full certificate lifecycle, from enrollment to binding on F5 SSL profiles, without human intervention. To be clear: this is an integration between two solutions, not a feature automatically built into the F5 platform or a single combined product.
The Problem We’re Solving
Security teams managing F5 environments face a familiar cycle: track expiration dates across dozens or hundreds of domains, generate new certificates, upload them manually, bind them to the correct SSL profiles, and hope nothing was missed. One oversight means an outage. One misconfiguration means a mismatch.
Now layer on the industry’s shift toward 47-day certificate lifespans. What was once a quarterly chore becomes a near-continuous operational burden. Manual management at this frequency isn’t just inefficient. It is unsustainable.
What the CertSecure Manager Orchestrator for F5 Integration Does
This isn’t an API wrapper or a monitoring plugin. CertSecure Manager Orchestrator for F5 provides a dedicated automation layer, a CertSecure Manager renewal agent for F5 BIG-IP environments, that connects CertSecure Manager to your BIG-IP instances and orchestrates every rotation from end to end.
Here’s what it handles from end to end:
- Direct F5 BIG-IP Connectivity: The renewal agent doesn’t generate a certificate and leave it in a queue. It uses F5 Advanced Shell (TMSH) commands to push the certificate and private key directly to your BIG-IP instance, then binds them to the correct SSL profile, removing the need for manual uploads or profile edits.
- Seamless Let’s Encrypt Enrollment: Use Let’s Encrypt as your CA for applications running behind F5. The integration handles the full ACME challenge response flow, certificate issuance, and deployment, free, fast, and fully automated. CertSecure Manager also supports a broad set of public and private CAs, so you can orchestrate certificates from the authority your enterprise already trusts.
- Zero Touch Deployment: A single “Renew and Apply” configuration setting triggers full certificate rotation as a completely automated background process, with no tickets and no manual steps.
- Intelligent Multi Domain Profile Mapping: Managing 50 domains? 500? CertSecure automatically maps each certificate to its correct F5 virtual server SSL profile, eliminating the manual mapping that leads to mismatches and outages.
- Real Time Audit Dashboard: Every certificate rotation, including serial number, binding status, and timestamp, is captured in the CertSecure dashboard. No spreadsheets. No guesswork. Audit-ready records on demand.
Why This Partnership Matters Right Now
The 47-day certificate cycle isn’t a distant proposal. It’s the direction the industry is moving, and security teams need infrastructure that can keep pace.
Organizations that continue to manage certificates across their F5 infrastructure manually will face an impossible trade-off: either dedicate significant team bandwidth to a repetitive operational task or accept the elevated risk of expired certificates causing unplanned downtime. The Encryption Consulting integration with F5 gives enterprises the cryptographic agility to orchestrate rapid rotations without adding headcount or risk.
Getting Started: Three Steps to Zero Touch
Onboarding the F5 integration is designed to be straightforward:
- Verify Prerequisites: Confirm your F5 account has Advanced Shell (TMSH) access and that Port 22 is open for agent communication.
- Deploy and Register: Install the CertSecure Manager agent for F5 and complete the secure handshake with your CertSecure dashboard using a registration token.
- Set and Forget: Configure your renewal policy to “Renew and Apply” and let CertSecure orchestrate every rotation from that point forward.
Ready to Eliminate Certificate Risk from Your F5 Environment?
Whether you’re preparing for the 47-day transition or simply looking to reduce operational risk today, our team is ready to walk you through a live demonstration of the CertSecure Manager Orchestrator for F5.
Contact us at info@encryptionconsulting.com to schedule your personalized F5 integration demo.
