The process of digital transformation with the introduction of technologies such as 5G, DevOps and Internet of Things has caused an explosion of connected devices in organizations. According to Cisco, there were more than 20 billion connected devices in 2021, and the expectation is that this number will reach 29 billion by 2023. The management of these devices is carried out through machine identities, such as digital certificates. In fact, in 2021, Gartner named Machine Identity Management as one of the 8 Security and Risk trends to consider. That’s because digital certificates can be compromised through cyber attacks, compromised CAs, or through negligence by employees or third parties.

In this way, ensuring the protection of machine identities should be one of the priorities in organizations’ cybersecurity programs. However, with the explosion in the amount of digital certificates in the infrastructure, their management has become more complex. The lack of proper management of digital certificates prevents administrators from having visibility of the certificates installed in the environment. This fact can lead to downtime due to expiration of digital certificates, which can not only cause loss of revenue, but also affect the trust of partners, customers and employees.

One of the best practices for the proper management of digital certificates is to first implement certificate discovery mechanisms. That’s because it’s impossible to protect what is not managed, and it’s impossible to manage what is not known. In addition, security leaders must periodically rotate digital certificates across the infrastructure to prevent their use by malicious users. It is also a good practice to implement mechanisms to identify and alert the expiration dates of digital certificates. In this way, the Security team is able to renew them and thus avoid downtime caused by certificate expiration.

To address all these aspects related to certificates, it is recommended to implement specific solutions for managing digital certificates. Gartner estimates that by 2022, organizations that implement this type of solution will experience 90% fewer certificate-related issues.

Thus, the implementation of a specific solution allows the discovery, centralized management and renewal of certificates in the infrastructure. In addition, the solution allows automating their entire life cycle, from generation to expiration control. Dashboards and reports also allow real-time alerts on the state of digital certificates in the environment.

Do you want to know more about how a Digital Certificate Management solution works and how it can help your company in operational improvement in the management of digital certificates?

On July 26th at 2:00 PM CET (July 28th 1 to 12:00 PM ET and 11:00 AM HKT) we will be hosting a webinar on the topic Certificate Management – Stop Worrying about it. Sign up now through this link.