What is Certificate Management?
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Digital certificates?are used across the Internet to authenticate users exchanging data with one another.?Since every legitimate website uses a certificate, certificate management is extremely important. If a certificate were to be stolen and misused, an attacker could pose as another, more legitimate, source and infect a user with malware via their website. The expiration of a certificate of a certificate can result in an outage, causing an organization to lose out on potential customers. These are just a few reasons to learn more about certificate management.
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What is Certificate Management?
Certificate management is the process of monitoring, processing, and executing every process in a certificate’s lifecycle. Certificate management is responsible for issuing, renewing, and deploying certificates to endpoints (servers, appliances, devices, etc.) so that network services are uninterrupted. Certificate management should also automate tasks (issuing, renewal, and so on), as well as provide real time status of the infrastructure of the network.
Certificate management helps manage the network and prevent interruptions and downtime, while providing a detailed monitoring of the whole infrastructure. Good certificate management plans should be able to handle any network, even ones with thousands of devices. If a certificate expires or is misconfigured, catastrophic outages all over the network may occur.
What is a Digital Certificate?
Any discussion of certificate management would be incomplete without explaining what a digital certificate is. A certificate, also known as an?SSL/TLS?certificate, is a digital identifier for users, devices, and other endpoints within a network. Certificates are linked with a public/private key pair and verify that the public key, which is matched with the?valid?certificate, can be trusted. The main job of a certificate is to ensure that data sent across a connection between a user and a server is kept private. The certificates does this by encrypting and decrypting data as it is sent across the connection. This is achieved through something called an SSL/TLS Handshake.