Does Your CLM Integrate with Your Tech Stack? Here’s Why It Should

In the age of remote working, it is more important than ever that every single human and machine interacting with a network has an ironclad cryptographic identity to establish digital trust.This is the only way modern enterprises can transact business securely. The solution? PKI (public key infrastructure) and digital certificates.

However, as users and devices continue to proliferate, the volume of digital identities is rapidly growing, as are the use cases for digital certificates (digital signatures, enabling Robotic Process Automation or RPA, securing DevOps environments and websites, the list goes on). Plus, enterprises can, and often do, procure digital certificates from an assortment of Certificate Authorities (CAs) for redundancy and risk management reasons. All this creates a very real operational challenge for enterprises: managing these identities effectively at scale.

Managing even the smallest network ecosystem today is a complex ongoing task for IT security teams. Don’t fall for the underdog fallacy, the idea that an organization is too small to be the target of a cyberattack. Everybody is a target. Every company has something of value, and no business that has any kind of digital operation is immune to the threat.

Against this backdrop, IT teams are juggling larger security tech stacks with a variety of products and services from different vendors for different use cases. It’s the IT security team’s job to make them work together, a practically impossible task. At the same time, teams must work within the limits of their resources and budgets, so efficiency is crucial. According to Gartner®, “Security and risk management leaders are increasingly dissatisfied with the operational inefficiencies and the lack of integration of a heterogenous security stack. As a result, they are consolidating the number of security vendors they use.” This trend will only continue to grow in importance and security stack vendors must respond.

Since 2020, Sectigo’s ongoing strategy has been built around this trend. Sectigo is focused on helping organizations establish digital trust and reduce risk by developing its SCM platform with openness and interoperability at its heart. This allows IT security leaders and their teams to consolidate existing technology silos, achieve crypto-agility, reduce security-stack complexity, optimize resources, enable compliance, and deliver ROI.

The solution is CA agnostic, automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) with the ability to discover, deploy, install, and renew the lifecycles of all digital certificates deployed within an enterprise ecosystem. This requires a CLM solution with flexibility to work within unique IT environments and integrate with the technologies teams are already using.

Ultimately, It’s About Risk Reduction

An open and interoperable CLM platform, at its very heart, reduces risk and complexity for security teams. Enterprise IT tech stacks tend to be siloed with isolated functions, and the technologies often do not work well together, resulting in cascading failures when something goes wrong.

For example, recall the O2 outage in 2018 that caused a day-long loss of service for millions of its cellular customers. It was all traced back to a single expired certificate in a third-party provider, which triggered a domino effect -- one certificate expired without being renewed, which caused the system to fail, and that eventually took down the entire data network for its major cell providers.

This type of situation is not unique and highlights the growing need for an automated CLM platform that is able to integrate with different digital certificate origins and technologies to provide a single pane of glass with visibility across all human and machine identities. This reduces the complexity, and fewer systems equal less potential for failure.

IT security teams, of course, can’t consolidate everything, and a stack of solutions is needed. The key is these solutions must be able to integrate with each other to properly manage digital identities at scale. An enterprise CLM solution can’t consist of a cobbled-together mix of technologies. It must be a unified single pane of glass platform to manage the CLM process and automate it from end to end.

Sectigo Certificate Manager’s Broad Set of Integrations

Sectigo Certificate Manager (SCM) is the first and most robust CA agnostic CLM on the market. We’re not shy about our broad set of technology integrations. IT teams can automate the issuance and management of Sectigo digital certificates, alongside those from other public CAs and private CAs such as Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS), AWS Cloud Services, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This is in addition to integrations with popular DevOps platforms like Kubernetes, Docker, HashiCorp, and more than a dozen leading technologies including leading Load Balancer platforms such as Amazon, Google, F5, A10 Networks and Kemp, popular CDNs like Akamai and Amazon, and even notification applications like Microsoft Teams and Slack.

With SCM, enterprises gain:

• Continuous certificate discovery. SCM populates a dashboard with a list of all discovered certificates, providing valuable information about the status and owner of each. The certificates are verified for compliance to the corporate policy, and notifications are sent in the event a certificate is about to expire, enabling its automatic renewal. It also detects any humans or machines that have a certificate but should not.
• Certificate issuance. SCM enables the automated delivery, installation, and renewal of certificates from a variety of CAs, replacing manual operations typically used.
• Certificate management. SCM offers a single dashboard to view all certificate metrics and statuses across the entire enterprise. An organization can track and control digital certificate creation, expiration, and renewal, ensuring crypto agility and creating a strong foundation of digital trust.
• Certificate governance. With SCM, organizations are able to enforce consistent corporate policies across all digital certificates from any CA. The enterprise can define the cryptographic strength and contents of all certificates and enforce control by only issuing certificates that comply to this policy.
• Cloud-based architecture. A CLM platform in the cloud offers resilience, scalability, a lower cost of deployment, and immediate availability of the latest CLM capabilities.

So, how do all these integrations work?

The short answer: seamlessly. Users simply enter their credentials for public CA APIs, providing access to on-demand certificate issuance. This setup takes only a few minutes and is very straightforward. The API credentials are never shared with Sectigo, and the customer is not required to disclose them, ensuring full compliance with the contracts with other CAs.

Sectigo provides a private CA as an option with SCM, but many enterprises might already have established private CAs with ADCS, GCP and AWS Cloud Services. SCM can issue and manage certificates from these CAs, interfacing directly with the vendor’s platform(s). Multiple private CAs can be integrated with SCM, providing complete flexibility and coverage of an enterprise’s certificate needs.

Once all CAs have been integrated into SCM, requests are issued to the appropriate CA and certificates can be managed via SCM for installation, renewal, revocation and automation. This provides the greatest visibility into their entire certificate ecosystem.

Learn more about why SCM is the leading CA agnostic solution on the market in this on-demand webinar, Certificate Lifecycle Management and the Integrations Ecosystem.

Plus, grab a demo to see it in action.