Keyfactor’s 2024 PKI & Digital Trust Report issue revealed more than a 40% surge in IoT, BYO mobile devices, and other devices used in company networks. This shift has significantly increased cyber risk and expanded entry points for attacks, thereby increasing the need for digital trust. Companies now rely on strong machine identities and PKI certificates to secure critical applications, web servers, and network devices.
Unfortunately, the volume of the certificates to manage is overwhelming IT teams and causing operational inefficiencies, vulnerabilities, and compliance risks, which, in a roundabout way, undermines the need for these certificates.
While PKI certificates secure sensitive data using encryption protocols, the disruptive abilities of quantum computing could eventually render these protocols inadequate.
PKI certificates and automated certificate lifecycle tools are no longer a nice-to-have security addition—they’re a necessity—but how do you convince a board of stakeholders of the indirect ROI of these security protocols and tools?
Our recent eBook, How Investing in Certificate Automation Protects Your Business & Bottom Line also includes a curated list of questions at the end of the book. Why? Because we believe these questions will help you justify the investment to key stakeholders. Now, let’s break down the benefits and ROI of certificate lifecycle automation (CLA) tools.
The cost of certificate management
PKI and machine identity are well-known concepts, with nearly all respondents (99.8%) reporting having a strategy to manage the systems and devices on their network. Yet, in the past two years, these organizations have faced an average of three certificate-related incidents, primarily from certificate outages, expirations, failed audits, and PKI misconfigurations.
These incidents take a toll on both the internal team and customers. Internally, it takes an average of 3 hours to identify the cause of certificate-related incidents and another 3 to fix it, often involving about eight team members. Plus, with cybersecurity professionals in critical demand, many organizations lack employees with the skills to resolve these issues quickly.
These disruptions can reduce brand confidence (48%), cause reputational damage (45%), and result in lost revenue (37%). These certificate incidents can also lead to compliance violations and can attract fines and penalties, especially for organizations in highly regulated industries with specific standards for encryption and security.
Certificate incidents usually happen when companies rely on manual processes or poor-quality tools to manage their certificates. Surprisingly, 38% of organizations still rely on homegrown methods, such as open-source tools and spreadsheets, to manage their PKI certificates.
While there are great open-source certificate management tools, and spreadsheets work perfectly well for small organizations with smaller security budgets and simple certificate landscape, they:
- Don’t provide some critical information like certificate ownership, workflow process, key storage information, etc.
- Only show you the certificates you know, leaving undiscovered certificates to be entry points for cyber attacks.
- Are prone to human error and misconfigurations, which can also lead to an outage or breach.
In addition to that, the staff members who create these homegrown systems might retire or leave the company, leaving the new and remaining staff clueless about how to continue managing the system.
When an outage occurs, the remediation process is worse if manual certificate management processes are used, thereby leading to longer recovery times. Teams are, therefore, taxed to address immediate issues without the proper tools, resulting in more errors and incomplete fixes.
Automated certificate lifecycle management
Manual processes create delays, raise error risks, and overwhelm teams as the number of certificates grows. The best solution is to invest in a dedicated CLA solution.
Here are some of the key benefits:
1. Improved visibility.
A centralized certificate management solution consolidates certificate tracking, monitoring, and management into a single interface. This approach allows teams to have a comprehensive view of certificate statuses, expiration dates, and renewal timelines. By having this “single pane of glass,” IT teams can quickly detect and proactively address certificate issues before they impact service availability.
Without centralization, certificates may be managed in silos across different departments or systems, leading to oversight gaps, missed renewals, and increased vulnerability to security breaches or outages. Centralized visibility not only simplifies management but also enables better decision-making and reduces human error, a common cause of outages.
2. Automates Tedious Process
CLA tools help automate certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation processes and generally simplify the entire lifecycle to lighten IT teams’ workload and allow them to focus on more strategic security priorities. Automated certificate management tools also help standardize configuration processes, ensuring consistency and eliminating variations that can occur when different team members handle tasks manually. This results in greater team efficiency, improved operational performance, and strengthened security.
Keyfactor Command is an example of a CLA tool that gives you complete visibility of your certificates across your entire system infrastructure. It helps you discover, manage, and automate the lifecycle of certificates from any private, public, or cloud-based CA to eliminate the risk of disruptive certificate outages.
3. Diverse & Scalable
A centralized CLA can handle a high number of certificates across multiple departments, such as HR, finance, IT, etc. For example, in email communication, a CLA ensures all employees use valid, properly issued certificates to maintain secure, encrypted data exchanges.
On the web front, a CLA platform manages SSL/TLS certificates, ensuring that company websites are trusted by browsers and preventing downtime due to expired or compromised certificates. In the case of a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), a CLA centralizes certificate management to verify the integrity and authenticity of software components, thereby ensuring compliance and security for your software supply chain.
As the business grows, a robust CLA solution should accommodate new certificates and services seamlessly without added complexity or risk. An example of such a CLA solution is Keyfactor’s EJBCA enterprise, a PKI platform that deploys fast, runs anywhere, and scales on-demand, allowing you to issue and manage as many certificates as you need to secure your network.
EJBCA also functions as a CA and allows you to replace all legacy CA solutions with a flexible alternative that integrates easily within DevOps workflows. It comes as a complete turnkey PKI, pre-packed with all the components, protocols, and software you need to get up and running. EJBCA can be deployed as a software or hardware appliance, in a container, in the cloud, as a service, or in a hybrid model.
Prepare for the future
PKI certificates rely on cryptography to authenticate identities and ensure data integrity; without it, secure communication would be impossible. Unfortunately, the advancement of quantum computing has the potential to break current certificate encryption methods, making it essential to adopt quantum-resistant certificate management tools.
Thankfully, many organizations have started post-quantum cryptography (PQC) planning and implementation. Sadly, this process is challenging, especially with the current shortage of skilled professionals.
Keyfactor helps with this transition by offering quantum-safe PKI certificate algorithms and tools like Keyfactor Command and EJBCA, which provide a detailed cryptographic inventory and risk assessment. These tools offer automated migration to hybrid and quantum-safe certificates to help you protect your sensitive data and maintain security resilience in the face of evolving quantum threats.
As you can now see, automated certificate lifecycle management tools play a vital role in upholding digital trust and a robust cybersecurity framework. Have any questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us anytime or set up a customized demo. Our team is here to help you!
