Nowadays, operating a business without an online presence is all but impossible. Even companies that operate primarily offline are starting to recognize the benefits of going online because it gives them access to a larger clientele and streamlines many of their procedures. The logical step after this realization is to invest in some digital real estate like social media accounts and a website.
However, while social media platforms are to some degree responsible for the security of users on the platform, the security of your website is completely up to you. And one of the easiest methods of protection you can adopt to protect your website is an SSL certificate. SSL certificates encrypt data transmitted between a user and your website server making it virtually impossible to intercept or replace the data stream.
Most website hosts these days provide SSL certificates as part of their hosting plans, and if you have an old website, you can simply approach your current host or buy from a third-party supplier. However, the lifecycle of an SSL certificate doesn’t stop after you install it. Here’s what you need to know about managing it.
What is Certificate Lifecycle Management?
The process of tracking, processing, and carrying out each step of a certificate’s lifecycle is known as certificate management. In order to maintain network services, certificate management is in charge of issuing, renewing, and deploying certificates to endpoints (servers, appliances, devices, etc.).
Why Certificate Lifecycle Management is Important to a Business’ Cybersecurity Strategy
Certificate management is crucial since every trustworthy website makes use of certificates. If a certificate were to be stolen and utilized improperly, an attacker could impersonate a different, more reliable source and use their website to infect a user with malware. Hence the reason it is necessary to protect the integrity of your business and safeguard your website’s visitors.
More Reasons Certificate Lifecycle Management is Important to a Business
- To Prevent Outages: When a certificate is revoked and not updated, or when the lifecycle has ended, outages occur. Hence to prevent these outages, effective certificate management systems need to be put in place.
- To avert breaches and damage to reputation: As a business, it is necessary to take cybersecurity seriously. If a certificate expires or is compromised, such a business could suffer attacks on its website that puts user data at risk. For instance, visitors will be exposed if they enter credit card information on a breached e-commerce site because the information won’t be encrypted as it travels back to the server of the e-commerce site.
Why Should You Invest in Automated Certificate Management Services?
Although it does so, certificate management automation is not simply about making life easier for IT workers. Additionally, it’s about shielding your company from the effects of certificate failures, safeguarding your reputation and financial health, and making sure that technology created to keep you safe doesn’t end up hurting your company. This might sound alarmist, but an expired certificate can create the right conditions for all these to happen. Certificate management automation makes sure you never have an expired certificate (at least, not for long).
A Certificate Lifecycle Management System (CLMS) can be a crucial and practical tool to maintain the ongoing security of your network, website, or other technological property. As your digital real estate portfolio burgeons, the number of certificates out there for your IT experts to monitor also increases. As such, it is not inconceivable that some human error will lead to expired and unrenewed certificates sooner or later. A CLMS helps you guard against this. When certificates are ready to expire, the automated CLMS will alert you. The right CLMS will even update your certificates as necessary.
Choosing The Right CLMS for Your Business
When choosing your automated certificate management system you need to understand what your IT needs are. There are a lot of CLMS out there and not all might work as reliably as needed. Finding one that conveniently automates your certificate reminders and renewals should be a crucial aspect of your search. Once you have a clear understanding of the certificates you need to manage and the resources you have available, choosing the best CLMS can be simple.
