While automating your certificate management guarantees a bevy of benefits, one perk stands head and shoulders above the rest: it’s a way to instantly reduce the cost, resources, and, crucially, the risks of managing certificates manually.
When you automate the entire process—from validation and issuance to renewal and revocation—you’re choosing to steer clear of some risks common to this terrain. Think of incorrect account access and SSL outages.
But the big question is, do you actually know how to implement certificate management automation? If your answer is no, this step-by-step blog is for you. So, just keep reading!
Why Automate Certificate Management?
Managing digital certificates manually can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process for organizations. The complexity of certificate lifecycles, including issuance, renewal, and revocation, coupled with the increasing number of certificates required, can overwhelm IT teams and introduce potential security risks.
Automating certificate management offers numerous benefits that address these challenges effectively. So, by automating this crucial process, businesses can:
- Save time and reduce errors: Automation eliminates the need for manual tasks, reducing human error and freeing up valuable time for IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Enhance security and compliance: Automated systems can ensure that certificates are consistently issued, renewed, and revoked in a timely manner, reducing the risk of expired or compromised certificates.
- Simplify scalability: As organizations grow and expand, the number of certificates needed increases. Automation enables seamless scaling, making it easier to manage and track a large number of certificates effortlessly.
- Improve operational efficiency: Automated workflows streamline the entire certificate management process, eliminating repetitive tasks and providing a centralized system for tracking and monitoring certificate activities.
How to Automate Your Certificate Management in 3 Steps
#1: Set Up Auto-Enrollment and Auto-Renewal in Your Environment
The first place to start is to figure out how to configure automatic renewal and enrollment of certificates in your environment. This can be Windows, Linux server, MacOS device, or networking gear.
The auto-enrollment feature is important because it ensures all the steps involved in enrollment are automated to make the process efficient and secure. Think of steps like CSR generation, provisioning, and domain ownership verification.
It is a good way to ensure your certificates are automatically renewed before they expire to maintain uninterrupted service. If you’re a Windows user, setting up auto-enrollment and auto-renewal is made easy courtesy of Microsoft CA. It’s, without a doubt, a solid feature to have.
Still, it only caters to your private (internal) certificates. So, what happens when you need to take care of your publicly trusted SSL/TLS certificates as well? That’s where step 2 comes in.
#2: Choose a Capable Vendor
Traditionally, the accepted logic was to have more than one vendor handling your automated certificate management needs. One vendor handles your private certificates and another one for your public SSL/TLS certificates.
But why have two vendors when you can have one? Let’s be honest; the overhead of managing multiple vendors can quickly get out of hand.
So, it’s recommend that you choose a vendor that can be your one-stop shop for everything auto-enrollment and auto-renewal. This capability often comes in the name of an automated certificate management system. Pay attention to the functionalities therein.
# 3: Start Issuing Certificates
Setting up auto-enrollment and auto-renewal? Check. Selecting a reliable vendor? Check. It’s now time to start rolling out certificates automatically.
Odds are, you have devices and users spread out in various operating systems across your environment. If you’re a non-Windows user, you can use your vendor’s SCEP server to roll out certificates automatically. In case you were wondering, you can only utilize the rather popular ACME Protocol using servers like Nginx and Apache.
Speaking of Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME), more than 130 open-source tools support it to make an administrator’s work a breeze. These include but are not limited to Docker, Kubernetes, Salt Stack, Ansible, and Puppet.
If you use DevOps to manage certificate issuance, you can utilize any of these AME-supported tools to help automate and streamline the process. By adding AMCE into the mix, you’re effectively saying goodbye to prolonged deployed time and costly human errors once and for all.
Automation Is the Present and the Future of Certificate Management
There’s no way around it – using automation in certificate management is the only way to ensure your site’s security efficiency, safety, and scalability. Postponing it means postponing these benefits. Don’t make that mistake.
Are you already sold on the perks of plugging automation into your certificate management processes? Sectigo’s Certificate Manager can help you achieve your goals with zero fuss and as quickly as possible.