What to Look for in an Automated Certificate Lifecycle Solution

Management of a Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, when it was initially created and utilized was a time-consuming and difficult process. The reason for this was that all the processes involved with maintaining the certificate lifecycle had to be handled manually. Teams of PKI maintainers would have to discover all of the certificates in their organization, list them all in a spreadsheet, and manually remember when and which certificates need to be renewed at the appropriate times.

This can cause a disruption of services if an important certificate’s renewal date is missed or forgotten, resulting in critical services going down because they do not have a valid certificate. Though that was the only practice when PKI was first created, now more and more companies are moving toward the practice of automating certificate lifecycle tasks.

With manual certificate management, those monitoring certificates had to enter the certificates and their renewal dates manually into spreadsheets to keep track of them. Luckily, tools to automate this process have been developed over time, making the automation process much easier. But why should organizations be so intent on changing their certificate lifecycle management to an automated process??

To learn more about certificate lifecycle management, visit Encryption Consulting