The use of digital certificates has never been higher. This trend has continued in large part due to the increasing demand for digital certificate tools to identify and control access to company networks.
Organizations are configuring wireless access points that limit access to external devices. This practice makes it so only authorized personnel and machines can access a given network.
Digital certificates serve as the chief method for both identifying and authenticating individuals and machines. As the number of identities within an organization increases, so does the complexity of managing (and safeguarding) these certificates at scale.
Proper management of digital certificates requires continuous issuance, renewal, and revocation—and accuracy is crucial.
This article will show you what to look for in a certificate manager and the right questions to ask vendors.
Visibility and Deployment
You can’t manage what you can’t see. This is especially true when it comes to digital certificates.
Visibility is paramount. There are always certificates issued outside of standard processes, often going unnoticed until they present a security risk. Rogue certificates can be challenging to find, as they’re typically scattered across servers, load balancers, firewalls, containers, and even multi-cloud environments.
Organizations commonly use an average of seven different certificate authorities. Each adds a layer of complexity to the management of digital certificates. Situations like these call for a more comprehensive tool that can continuously discover all existing certificates, regardless of their location or origin.
Whatever route you choose, the ideal certificate manager should offer multiple mechanisms for discovering certificates. It should also be capable of managing them centrally through some kind of universal hub.
Questions to Ask Vendors:
- Can you discover and manage every certificate, even those not issued through its platform?
- Does your solution require significant changes to firewall rules and port configurations when deployed in environments with multiple network segments or cloud services?
- Does your solution inventory and manage the root of trust certificates on network endpoints?
We recommend choosing a certificate management solution with comprehensive discovery capabilities and centralized management. It will better ensure that no certificate goes unnoticed and provides a more controlled and transparent digital environment.
Monitoring and Reporting
Once you have a complete inventory of certificates, the next step is active monitoring. This involves keeping tabs on certificate expiration, compliance, and usage.
Access to a dashboard and reporting functions are a start, but for efficient management, a customizable interface for managing certificates will be needed. Customization brings faster prioritization of certificates and response to issues.
Managing certificates also involves grouping and tagging them with business or application-relevant data. This strategy grants better visibility and control, making it easier to handle certificates according to importance or function.
Furthermore, the chosen tool should support configurable metadata for tailored use.
Questions to Ask Vendors:
- Does your solution offer customizable and clickable dashboards?
- Do you impose limitations on the format or number of metadata you can use?
- Does your solution allow us to revoke issued certificates directly from the console?
A proactive approach to monitoring and reporting, along with customizable features, is key to maintaining oversight and the ability to respond quickly.
Lifecycle Automation
Organizations manage a staggering average of 81,139 internally trusted certificates, as noted in the PKI & Digital Trust Report. With the sheer volume of certificates continually increasing, overseeing the full lifecycle of each—from issuance to revocation—can easily lead to missed expirations and system outages.
An effective certificate manager provides lifecycle automation, which greatly reduces oversights and grants smoother operations. Lifecycle management should also include automated renewal and provisioning that directly services end-devices, essentially making expired certificates a thing of the past.
Another important feature is having a straightforward enrollment process in place that facilitates widespread adoption of digital certificates. Be sure to ask your chosen vendor if their solution offers an extensible workflow engine that can handle thousands of certificate requests. Additionally, for organization-wide certificate management, the solution should integrate seamlessly with existing IT service management (ITSM) workflows.
Furthermore, make sure the tool provides crypto-agility at scale. This will allow you to switch between multiple vendors or move from one certificate authority (CA) to another swiftly—a notable advantage as cryptographic standards change, particularly as we enter a time of post-quantum computing.
Questions to Ask Vendors:
- Can your solution manage certificates that are already in place or deployed through other processes?
- In the event of a CA compromise or algorithm deprecation, how quickly can your solution re-issue certificates (potentially tens or hundreds of thousands) from a new CA?
- Does your solution integrate with IT service management (ITSM) systems for request workflows and incident reporting?
Lifecycle automation not only mitigates the risk of certificate-related failures but also keeps your organization prepared for future cryptographic standards, providing peace of mind and operational continuity.
Ecosystem Integration
The chosen certificate manager must integrate with the systems within your organization, as this greatly influences its effectiveness.
Basic support for protocols like ACME, SCEP, and Windows auto-enrollment is necessary, but understanding deeper integration capabilities helps in choosing the appropriate tool and how it can be tailored to specific use cases.
For organizations with a DevOps function, the ability to support API-driven integrations that align with existing workflows and toolsets, such as code signing, is critical. In scenarios involving IoT and mobile device management systems, selecting a vendor that can handle the scale and complexity of these ecosystems is also advisable.
Additionally, if your operations are cloud-based, be sure that the certificate manager can not only perform usual certificate lifecycle functions directly within cloud workloads but also integrate with cloud key vaults.
Questions to Ask Vendors:
- Do you support industry-standard protocols that your applications will need?
- Can your solution integrate with target systems, such as network equipment, web servers, key vaults, mobile devices, cloud, and containerized platforms?
- Do you provide a framework to build custom connectors when necessary?
Comprehensive ecosystem integration brings strategic alignment, a stronger security posture, and less costly operations.
Policy and Governance
Keys and certificates are the backbone of your organization’s security infrastructure. The risk escalates when a rogue user issues a non-compliant or unauthorized certificate, potentially exposing systems. That means the chosen certificate manager needs access controls, policy guardrails, and clear audit logs.
A sophisticated policy engine that can enforce strict certificate policies is also highly beneficial. Such an engine prevents the issuance of non-compliant certificates, thereby maintaining tighter security standards.
Additionally, generating detailed audit trails of certificate and user-related activities helps in tracing actions and establishing accountability within the organization’s digital environment.
Questions to Ask Vendors:
- Does your solution allow you to configure private key storage and retention policies?
- Are private keys required to be stored within the system, or can they be generated remotely on the device?
- Does your solution integrate with popular privileged access management (PAM) and hardware security module (HSM) providers?
Policy enforcement and governance keeps your security measures proactive. We not only recommend this approach to better secure your digital assets but also to maintain alignment with risk management best practices and regulatory compliance.
Choosing The Ideal Certificate Manager
Securing the best certificate manager for your organization comes from asking the right questions. By doing so, you’ll be able to effectively sift through potential vendors and start the conversation with one that already aligns with your security needs and organizational goals.
Remember, the chosen solution should not only improve security posture but also integrate well with existing systems, making it a strategic asset for the overall IT infrastructure.
See also: How Hackers Exploit Identity-Based Access Control Weaknesses to Get In
