LATEST INTELLIGENCE
Six Steps to SSL
Certificate
Lifecycle Management
Upon issuance, all SSL digital certificates have a finite
lifespan and are no longer recognized as valid upon
expiration. Certificates may have varying periods of
validity and are often set to expire anywhere between
one and three years based on company policy and/or cost
considerations.
Minimally, certificates need to be replaced at the end of
their life to avoid service disruption and decreased security.
However, there may be a number of scenarios where a
certificate needs to be replaced earlier (e.g., Heartbleed
bug, SHA-1 end-of-life migration, company mergers, change
in company policy).
Given the finite lifespan of SSL certificates and their
widespread use throughout an organization, there are
numerous reasons to take a lifecycle management approach.
It’s critical to maintain an accurate accounting of SSL
certificates that doesn’t rely on manual processes and tools.
This guide — intended for IT and security professionals
— outlines the key elements of a certificate lifecycle
management process and how to provide adequate tools
and training to implement this process.
Take the guesswork out of certificate management and
automate certificate lifecycle processes to achieve better
oversight and control, lower costs, improve efficiency and
reduce security risks.
Establish your Blueprint
for Centralized Certificate
Lifecycle Management
Whether due to security events, industry changes,
compliance requirements, the necessity to improve
business processes and reduce costs, the need to identify
and manage SSL certificates is critical to goals of your
organization.
Managing the purchase, deployment, renewal and expiry
of digital certificates for multiple Web servers, purposes
and users — sometimes in many different locations —
can be time-consuming and costly.
Certificate management is often a dynamic, complicated
undertaking. Tracking expiry, vendor compliance and key
sizes can be difficult, even for organizations with a small
number of certificates in use. But this task is magnified in
large organizations with hundreds of certificates deployed
across different networks, systems and applications.
Leverage Web-based, self-service certificate management
and discovery solutions — core components of Entrust
Cloud — to streamline certificate lifecycle management
and provide dramatic improvements in efficiency and cost
control.
Consolidating all your SSL certificates into a single
lifecycle management platform is not a simple process.
Nevertheless, it’s a process that can be managed, without
disruption, via a systematic transition plan. It’s critical to
prepare for change.
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