Security certificates are an essential part of any digital business. They assure your customers and partners that their data is safe and secure. But managing security certificates can be a time-consuming and complex task, which is why certificate management systems are becoming increasingly popular.

An automated certificate management system allows you to automate the entire lifecycle of your security certificates, from initial issuance to renewal, revocation, and replacement. Certificate management systems guarantee the security and integrity of digital certificates. Without it, the risk of certificate fraud and other cyber attacks increases significantly.

This article will discuss four reasons why certificate management systems are vital to your digital business.

Definition of Certificate Management

Managing certificates is nothing but monitoring, executing as well as processing each process in the lifecycle of a certificate. This process is responsible for renewing, issuing as well as deploying certain certificates to endpoints. The aim is to ensure that nothing interrupts the network services. Certificate management is also responsible for automating tasks. 

When it comes to offering real-time status of the network infrastructure, you know whom to trust. It helps in managing the network, along with avoiding downtime and interruptions and offering detailed infrastructure monitoring. An efficient certificate management plan must be able to take care of any network, even those dealing with multiple devices. 

You might be wrong if you underestimate the power of certificate management. They literally save the network from catastrophic outrages and misconfigurations. 

4 Reasons Why Certificate Management Systems Are Important For Your Digital Business

Managing digital certificates can be a complex and time-consuming process, especially for large organizations with multiple certificates. An automated certificate management system helps you streamline this process, saving time and resources.

1. Establishing Trust With Customers

A certificate management system helps build customer trust by providing secure, transparent, and consistent HTTPS connections. Certificates are provisioned and renewed automatically, minimizing downtime due to expiration or human error. Customers check newly issued and renewed certificates to know if the connection is up-to-date and trustworthy.

This transparency and consistency increase confidence that your security measures are robust and that verified trust in SSL/TLS certificates is maintained, ensuring customers can trust secure connections.

2.  Reducing Downtimes

An automated certificate management system proactively renews your security certificates before they expire. It also phases out new certificates in batches to minimize system impact. Proactive lifecycle management identifies and resolves issues with certificates before they cause downtime, minimizing customer impact.

Since automation scales more efficiently with large volumes of certificates, it reduces the risk of procedural downtime interrupting manual processes. With Sectigo’s automated certificate management system,  you can minimize downtime by deploying across multiple servers, providing redundant certificates for failover, and scaling more effectively as your business grows.

3. Enhancing Your Cybersecurity Measures

Using a certificate management system improves your cybersecurity measures by strictly enforcing SSL/TLS best practices. These include using 2048-bit keys, verifying only approved certificate authorities, and setting strict policies. They also give you insight into all certificates and identify expired or insecure certificates that can be abused.

They integrate with other cybersecurity tools to automate revocation checks, blacklist risky certificates, and block expired certificates. An automated certificate management system strengthens your overall SSL/TLS security posture by adhering to best practices, reducing human error, increasing visibility into certificate risks, and integrating with other security systems.

4. Protecting Your Sensitive Business Information

An automated certificate management system enables HTTPS and TLS data encryption in transit. This helps you protect sensitive business information with enforcement, proactive renewal of certificates to maintain continuous encryption, and integrated security tools.

A sound certificate management system also helps detect insecure certificates that hackers can exploit. Automation ensures that your certificates are deployed and managed consistently, maximizing data protection through solid data encryption in transit and secure authentication of your systems. This comprehensive approach, supported by consistent automation, helps protect sensitive data across your business networks and systems.

Lifecycle Of A Certificate 

Certificate management comes with a dedicated lifecycle, some of which are mentioned below:

• Discovery

The foremost stage of any certificate lifestyle is discovery. In this phase, the network gets scanned for unused, expired, or missing certificates. The discovery phase also ensures that certificates in place are efficiently deployed. Detecting and replacing certificates having vulnerabilities is easy with certificate management. Lastly, the discovery phase commonly segregates different certificates. 

• Buying/Creation 

This is where the Certificate authority develops the certificate. When the user buys a certificate from a reliable CA, it also falls under this category. The primary pair for this certificate gets created alongside the CSR, public key, and identifiable data, later sent to the CA. Certificates can either be created or purchased. 

• Installation

The installation period is all about the distribution as well as installation of the certifications in an optimum place. Here, the CAs are in charge of checking every attribute of the certificate’s configuration. This might include cipher suites, key pairs as well as digital signatures. Later, the certificate gets installed on the suitable endpoint. 

• Storing

Another very important stage of a certificate’s lifecycle is its storing phase. One might access the certificates, but they will no longer be reusable. Hence, you need to keep them in a centralized and essentially-confidential location. This phase might also inventory these certificates into groups, provided the inventorying is not done during the discovery period. 

• Monitoring

Monitoring has to be the longest phase in the process. As the name suggests, it is the process wherein certificates are thoroughly monitored during their expiration period. After reaching the expiration date, some certificate management systems might renew the certificate automatically.

Managing Your Security Certificates For Better Efficiency

The increasing scope of digital business carries a lot of security risks. Implementing certificate management helps mitigate risks by improving your certificate lifecycle management process. With the right certificate management system, you can manage, secure, and automate processes like certificate renewals, revocations, and issuance. This helps safeguard your data, increase customer trust, and ensure seamless digital operations.

With this, our guide on the certificate management system’s importance comes to an end. Is there anything you would like us to add? Let us know in the comment section below. Thank you for reading!

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