Here’s why you should automate your certificate lifecycle management.
1. It Alleviates Time-Consuming Processes
Managing the certificate lifecycle—from deployment all the way to renewal—using spreadsheets can be incredibly time-consuming and inefficient. As the number of certificates and associated data increases, managing them solely through manual effort becomes even more challenging. Inevitably, a huge number of staff hours go down the drain, a big blow to your productivity and security goals.
Automated certificate lifecycle management tosses these concerns out of the window through centralization and consolidation. Tracking and monitoring of certificates happen centrally, without human intervention, and in a safe and expedited manner.
2. It Greatly Reduces the Chances of Human Error Occurring
Manually managing a large number of certificates and sorting them out is a taxing endeavor at best and unreliable at worst. It gets messier and more complicated when you have to prioritize the certificates based on different criteria, say validity and applicability. Beyond that, setting alerts for when certificates are due for expiry or revocation is every administrator’s worst nightmare. Even if you’re able to pull it off, can you steer clear of the all-too-common human error?
Automating your certificate management goes a long way in removing human errors from the equation. It achieves this by:
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Automatically locating every certificate present on your network
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Notifying you and your team on expiration dates and invalidities
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Assist in streamlining and automating the certification installation process
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Seamlessly integrating with monitoring tools to provide a holistic, unobstructed view of certificate health
3. It Requires Little to No Manpower
The process of renewing and installing certificates takes nothing short of a few days or weeks to complete. When you multiply this timeframe by the number of active certificates a team possesses, it’s quite evident that most teams face a considerable challenge from a manpower perspective. Medium and small-scale businesses don’t have the capacity to handle such a large-scale task on a recurring basis.
Moreover, with the reduced lifespan of certificates to just one year, the situation becomes even more problematic. Even if entire teams dedicate themselves to managing the certificate lifecycle, relying solely on manual operations can still result in missed renewals due to unexpected certificate expirations. Needless to say, a missed renewal is a gaping security hole waiting to be explored.
Automating your certificate lifecycle management process allows you to reduce your reliance on manual effort. Systems in this realm generally have robust automation features, such as reminders for certificate expirations and automated workflows for renewed processes. Bid goodbye to wasted and improperly utilized manpower and instantly say hello to efficiency and reinforced PKI security.
4. It Makes Compliance a Breeze
Achieving compliance with manual certificate lifecycle management is certainly possible, but it can be challenging and prone to human error. Compliance requirements for encryption typically involve strict processes and adherence to specific guidelines, including GDPR and PCI DSS, which can be difficult to consistently maintain through manual management alone. Regulatory changes, documentation and auditing issues, as well as oversight and consistency challenges, will almost always catch you off guard, potentially leading to non-compliance and security gaps.
An automation tool helps with the scheduling of regular checks and timely replacement of certificates, effectively preventing possible breaches and penalties due to non-compliance.
The Hero: Automated Certificate Management System
The era of putting up with the villain that is manual certificate lifecycle management is over. Automation, the real and legitimate hero, is here to stay, and it brings with it a whole host of benefits, from saved money, time, and effort to zero chances of human error occurring. More importantly, it helps toughen the overall security enterprise defense, which is the need of the hour.
Powered by enterprise-grade automation, Sectigo’s comprehensive certificate management solutions help with centralized management of keys and certificates for maximum efficiency, compliance, and PKI security.
