Unveiling the Latest in Certificate Lifecycle Management: CertiNext CLM

In an age where digital infrastructure forms the backbone for trust in every enterprise, the importance of managing digital certificates cannot be overstated. Mismanaged certificates pose risks—ranging from system outages and security breaches to non-compliance with regulatory requirements. CertiNext CLM was designed with the enterprise in mind, addressing these challenges by simplifying certificate management across large-scale, hybrid infrastructures while offering robust automation and compliance features.

Understanding Today’s Attack Surfaces and Certificate Management Challenges

As enterprises rapidly expand their digital footprints, their attack surfaces grow in parallel, making secure certificate management a critical part of the cybersecurity puzzle. With hybrid environments becoming the new norm—spanning on-premise, cloud, and remote endpoints—the challenge is further amplified. Adding to this, the reduced lifecycles of certificates (often mandated to reduce risk and limit the impact of compromises) and the need for CA redundancy have made traditional, manual approaches to certificate lifecycle management increasingly impractical.

Recent disruptions in the certificate landscape have highlighted the importance of reliability and redundancy in choosing a Certificate Authority. For example, Google announced that it will begin distrusting Entrust certificates by October 2024, followed by Mozilla in November. Moreover, DigiCert recently disclosed a major issue, announcing the revocation of over 83,000 SSL/TLS certificates due to a bug in its backend software. These events underscore the need for enterprises to implement solutions that can seamlessly handle such disruptions without compromising their security posture or business operations.

The latest release of CertiNext CLM (R1427) brings significant enhancements that reflect the evolving needs of organizations today. These new features are geared toward advancing security, streamlining certificate lifecycle management processes, and ensuring that businesses can stay compliant without being weighed down by operational complexity.

Key Features of the Latest CertiNext CLM Release

The core of this release introduces features that fundamentally improve the way organizations manage their certificates—creating a secure, efficient, and compliant environment for certificate management.

1. DSC-based Login for Enhanced Security

As we witness increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, securing access to certificate management platforms has never been more critical. With CertiNext’s Digital Signature Certificate (DSC)-based login, organizations can be assured that only authorized, digitally verified individuals gain access to the platform. This is an important step in safeguarding sensitive certificate management functionalities, ensuring the right individuals are in control.

2. Comprehensive Certificate Discovery

Visibility across an enterprise’s IT infrastructure is crucial for maintaining compliance and preventing certificate-related outages. CertiNext’s enhanced certificate discovery capability allows for the automatic detection of certificates across multiple environments—whether in SSL, HSM, LDAP, File Systems, Certificate Stores, or Cloud Providers (e.g. AWS). This ensures that no certificate is left unmanaged, significantly mitigating the risk posed by unmonitored or expired certificates.

3. Advanced Certificate Lifecycle Management

Managing certificates effectively requires more than just tracking expiration dates. CertiNext CLM allows enterprises to take control of the entire certificate lifecycle with features like:

• Rotate
• Rekey
• Revoke
• Suspend
• Reinstate
• Order
• Deploy

By integrating with Certificate Transparency (CT) logs, CertiNext also enables real-time monitoring, ensuring organizations are alerted to any certificate-related issues well before they escalate.

4. Customizable Reporting and Billing

Effective management goes beyond technology—it includes financial oversight. CertiNext now offers Proforma Invoice generation and group credit management features, empowering organizations to better manage their certificate-related expenses. The detailed reporting capabilities ensure organizations have a clear view of their certificate health and compliance, streamlining audit processes and improving overall governance.

Driving Innovation in Certificate Lifecycle Management with CertiNext CLM

CertiNext CLM is more than just a tool; it’s a platform built to address the demands of the modern enterprise, ensuring certificates and cryptographic keys are managed efficiently and securely. The latest release marks a major step forward in automating processes that would otherwise be manual and prone to error. Also, as browsers, applications and operating systems tend to require shorter and shorter lifetimes on certificates (to reduce risk and impacts of compromises), more frequent certificate creation and transactions imply automation of these processes is the practical path forward, eliminating the cost and effort of manual interventions. As enterprises grow, the complexity of managing digital certificates multiplies, and CertiNext is designed to simplify this complexity while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.

1. Comprehensive Visibility and Control

CertiNext CLM provides complete visibility and control over certificates across environments, ensuring that every certificate—whether public or private—is fully accounted for and managed. This enhanced visibility is critical for preventing unplanned outages, which can result from unnoticed certificate expirations.

Key Discovery and Deep Insights

CertiNext enables comprehensive discovery across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. The Deep Discovery feature provides detailed insights into certificate attributes, such as expiration dates, algorithms, and chains of trust, ensuring organizations have the necessary information to stay ahead of certificate management.

Certificate Transparency Logs

By monitoring CT logs, CertiNext ensures continuous tracking of publicly trusted SSL/TLS certificates, providing real-time visibility into certificate activity. This mitigates risks related to expired certificates, helping organizations maintain smooth and secure operations.

2. Automation for Operational Efficiency

The real strength of CertiNext lies in its ability to automate complex workflows, from issuance and renewals to revocations and provisioning. This significantly reduces the manual effort required, freeing up valuable time for teams to focus on higher-priority tasks.

Agent-Based Scanning and Provisioning

CertiNext’s agent-based scanning offers a deeper level of insight into certificates on remote systems, ensuring that even hard-to-reach servers are covered. Agent-based provisioning ensures certificates are securely deployed with minimal manual intervention, reducing the risk of human errors.

3. Secure Integration with Advanced Protocol Support

In the digital landscape, integration is key to efficiency. CertiNext CLM supports a broad range of protocols, including SCEP, ACME, EST, and CMP, to ensure seamless communication between Certificate Authorities (CAs) and an enterprise’s IT infrastructure.

CMP Protocol for Scalable Management

The Certificate Management Protocol (CMP) is a powerful tool for automating the enrolment, renewal, and revocation of certificates. This protocol makes it possible to scale certificate management across complex, large-scale environments, ensuring continuity and reliability.

4. Enhanced Key Management with KMIP Support

CertiNext CLM’s support for the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) ensures that cryptographic keys are securely managed across systems. KMIP automates key generation, distribution, and rotation, making it easier for organizations to maintain secure cryptographic practices without manual oversight.

With nShield, Thales Luna, Utimaco, and FutureX as examples of supported Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), CertiNext integrates seamlessly with leading HSMs, ensuring secure key management across the enterprise. This robust integration allows for automated key generation, distribution, and rotation, reducing the complexity of managing cryptographic keys while maintaining the highest levels of security.

5. Extensive Reporting for Compliance

Organizations today must meet rigorous compliance standards, and CertiNext CLM offers detailed reporting tools that make it easier to track certificate health, expiry, and overall compliance. These reports are fully customizable and ideal for audits or operational reviews.

CertiNext supports standards like SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, WebTrust, FIPS140-3 and EAL4+, ensuring that enterprises can operate in full confidence that they meet the highest standards of security.

6. Integration with Leading Enterprise Systems

CertiNext integrates seamlessly with emCA, emSign, and other leading Certificate Authorities (CAs), such as Microsoft CA (ADFS), DigiCert and Entrust. Its compatibility with ITSM platforms ensures that enterprises can easily incorporate CertiNext into their existing workflows, enhancing operational efficiency and flexibility.

CertiNext CLM is a Strategic Asset

The future of digital certificate management lies in automation, security, and compliance. CertiNext CLM, through its robust feature set and seamless integration capabilities, is designed to meet the needs of modern enterprises. By automating critical workflows, offering deep visibility, and ensuring compliance, CertiNext empowers businesses to safeguard their digital infrastructure with confidence.

For a deeper dive into the latest release, explore the full Release Notes: CertiNext CLM R1427 (27-Sep-2024) or reach out to the eMudhra team directly at https://emudhra.com/ .

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