How to Achieve Complete Visibility Across All Cryptographic Assets
Digital certificates underpin all industries and secure an almost limitless number of systems and processes. They allow humans and machines, whether a humble printer in the corner of a home office or sophisticated IoT devices in a factory, to verify their digital identities and establish digital trust as they’re interacting with other humans, machines or digital services.
The sheer number of digital certificates and their growing use cases create a very real operational challenge for enterprises: managing them at scale. This challenge is compounded by a number of issues:
- In many cases, the deployment of digital certificates is siloed across many departments within an organization. This makes it hard for CISOs and their teams to gain a view of all digital certificates issued across the enterprise network.
- Digital Certificates can be procured from a variety of Certificate Authorities (CAs), and enterprise IT teams actively choose to deploy digital certificates originating from different CAs for redundancy reasons. However, this causes certificate management issues as many Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) Platforms fail in their ability to manage the lifecycles of all digital certificates, regardless of origin and CA providers.
- The lifespan of any one digital certificate may differ from another. Some, like the digital certificates securing DevOps containers, might only be valid for a few hours or days, while others can be valid for up to one year or more. At scale, this creates a scenario where CISOs and their teams need to constantly monitor digital certificate lifespans to avoid expiration and potential downtime.
Traditional methods of digital certificate management are not fit for purpose or scalable within today’s modern enterprise. Often, digital certificates are managed manually via spreadsheets. This is no longer a sustainable approach, especially as the number of digital certificate use cases continues to grow.
Increasingly, CISOs and their teams are turning to automated CLM solutions to overcome the headaches with traditional digital certificate management and establish digital trust for the growing number of humans and machines accessing their systems. However, to achieve crypto agility, many have needed to deploy and manage a patchwork of multiple CLM solutions. This has created too many costly platforms and solutions and increased risk.
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.” [1]
Ultimately, CISOs and their teams need a solution which delivers full CLM capability for all digital certificates, regardless of their origins. At Sectigo, we call this ‘CA agnostic,’ and it has been our mission since 2021 to provide enterprises full visibility across the entire enterprise digital certificate ecosystem. This allows IT security teams to consolidate existing technology silos, achieve crypto-agility, reduce security-stack complexity, optimize resources, enable compliance, and deliver ROI, all via a single-pane-of-glass.
Substantial Cost Savings with a Single-Pane-of-Glass
Sectigo understands that security vendor consolidation is a critical priority for IT teams as they focus on achieving crypto-agility. IT teams need the flexibility to work within their unique environments and require an automated CLM solution that leverages open standards and integrates with other technologies within the enterprise stack. Enterprise security teams increasingly opt for a vendor-agnostic approach. In response, Sectigo has led the way in developing the first fully CA agnostic CLM platform.
Since 2020, Sectigo’s focus has been on innovating open and interoperable solutions, and Sectigo Certificate Manager (SCM) is designed to manage and automate the lifecycles of all digital certificates, including those issued by Sectigo and many other public and private CAs. Simply put, not all CLM platforms are created equal, and SCM is the only true single-pane-of-glass solution on the market. We really mean it:
- A single login.
- Seamless migration.
- Complete discovery and visibility across all cryptographic assets.
All from one single platform.
Combining public and private digital certificate issuance and CLM into a single-pane-of-glass allows for substantial cost savings and management efficiencies. Not all CLM platforms can deliver on this need. SCM is the industry’s first and most robust fully automated CA agnostic CLM platform, and recently it got even better with the announcement that organizations can now seamlessly issue and manage certificates originating from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and AWS Private CAs.
These additional integrations further deliver on Sectigo’s CA agnostic commitment and add to a growing roster that enables the issuance and management of certificates within Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS), other public CAs, popular DevOps platforms and more than a dozen leading technology integrations. This provides complete visibility and lifecycle control over all certificates.
Book a demo to see for yourself.
[1] Gartner Press Release, Gartner Survey Shows 75% of Organizations Are Pursuing Security Vendor Consolidation in 2022, September 13, 2022 - https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-09-12-gartner-survey-shows-seventy-five-percent-of-organizations-are-pursuing-security-vendor-consolidation-in-2022
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