Certificate Lifecycle Management
"On average, companies spend 225 hours manually managing 50 certificates a year[2]. About 74% of enterprises have seen system outages due to unplanned certificate expiration[3], and over 50% have a lost or rogue digital certificate"
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Certificates typically have a 4-phase lifecycle - Discovery, Enrollment, Provisioning, and End-of-life. To make your PKI mature and reliable, you must have more control over all the phases. The key aspects of these 4 phases are:
Discovery Phase
- Extract from known sources
- Network scans
- Monitoring
Enrollment Phase
- Procedures to request/ obtain new certificates
Provisioning Phase
- Processes and procedures for distribution/ installation of certificates
- Automation
End of life Phase
- Processes for revocation/ renewal of certificates
Why you need a certificate management system
A certificate management system becomes necessary when your organization faces any of the following scenarios
- Your manual labor reaches a threshold. One full-time-employee (FTE) can maintain about 40 certificates a week, or 2000 per year, assuming, the same person can do it all. Certificates are valid for 1 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/renewal processes of certificates are not defined.
- Reporting & monitoring required. If you need network scanning to detect unauthorized users of a certificate, or monitor the site to detect tampering/ active MITM, or meet compliance for certificate inventory reports.
Challenges in a certificate management system
Every organization faces the following challenges in creating and maintaining the certificate lifecycle:
- Core Work
- Establishing requirement
- Architecture design
- Importing existing certificates
- Network discovery scan
- Configuring policies and reports
- Onboarding applications
- Documentation on operations
- Training
- Additional Work
- Integration with other systems (e.g, ticketing, IDM)
- Automation
- Custom reporting
- Challenges
- Network scans usually return a lot of data. Guidelines are needed to determine what is important
- It is difficult to get certificate ownership, if the organization does not have application/ data owners already
defined
Key challenges of an organization
While dealing with certificate management, most organizations face challenges like manual-labour crossing the threshold, missing lifecycle processes, a need for monitoring/ reporting, automation of processes, or lack of operational documentation and training.
Solving your problems
We can solve your challenges & problems in certificate lifecycle management, through the following:
- Establishing requirement, and designing the architecture
- Performing network discovery scan
- Importing existing certificates
- Configuring policies and reports
- Onboarding a set of pilot applications
- Preparing documentation for operations and training
- Developing a plan for addressing gaps
- Developing a guide for process/ operations and certified training
Encryption Consulting offers a broad range of services in the Key and Certificate Management space, from strategy to implementation and managed services.
Professional Services Offered
- Implementing Certificate life cycle solution for certificate management
- Implementing Certificate life cycle solution for SSH key management
- Implementing automation for certificate lifecycle on various platforms (e.g. F5, tomcat, IIS)
- Integrating PKI with other security services (typically to enable cert based authentication on VPN, Wi-Fi, NAC)
Case Study
See how Encryption Consulting assisted a Healthcare and Life Science Company by reviewing their current practices.
"Encryption Consulting helped us remediate our high risk areas by creating a custom roadmap for our organization based on a thorough Assessment of our existing encryption environment"
VP Data Protection, Airline Industry
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