What Is Certificate Management? 5 Key Things to Know

Your digital certificate of acknowledgment symbolizes you, and you are responsible for keeping it secure from any damage. A digital certificate should be protected from cyber threats like computer viruses, data breaches, etc.

The digital or SSL/TLS certificate is a digital identifier for devices, users, and other physical devices connected to the network. Therefore, certificate management is essential to ensure your digital certificate is adequately secured, as it involves administering and overseeing it.

It helps supervise and ensures that digital certificates are issued, renewed, and revoked when necessary.

Here are some 5 key things to know about certificate management.

1. Issuance and Renewal Process

The identity of entities in online transactions is verified when your digital certificate is issued by Certificate Authorities (CAs). Verifying your identity, i.e., the requester of the certificate, before issuing the certificate is important. It binds your identity to a network.

The process involves submitting a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) which includes your ‘identity’ information. To help you with such purposes a Certificate Management Solution is needed since it provides tools, processes and policies which manage the certificates efficiently.

After verifying, the CAs digitally signs the certificate to state the authentication of binding of public key and your identity. These certificates usually have validity of several months or years.

When the validity expires, it needs to be renewed for continued trust between clients and systems. For renewal, a new CSR is generated and submitted to the CA again before the expiration of your current certificate.

Certificate management solution has an automated process for renewal in advance. It helps to renew your validity before the expiration to reduce the risk of services being stopped or interrupted due to the expiration of your certificate.

2. General Management

Digital certificates are required to be monitored throughout their existence to make them reliable and certificate management solutions are responsible for managing them.

Continuous monitoring helps to check the validity of the certificate and its usage to track any issues like expiration date or unauthorized usage. Suppose there are issues relating to any unauthorized usage; for such case, your digital certificate needs to be revoked even before its expiration date for security reasons.

Hence, certificate management solutions help to revoke your certificate to alert the authorities of it being misused by some imposter. There is also an archival feature for your certificates.

Under archival, your digital certificates, which are expired or revoked, can be stored and managed. So, it helps to ensure and verify past transactions by your certificate even after it expires.

3. Security

Certificates establish a secured trust between the entities in digital communications, and to help ensure trust, certificate management plays an integral role.

  • Encryption: It helps to protect private information, sensitive data and improves the security of your certificate to ensure confidentiality and prevent any misuse.
  • Authentication: Such a feature authenticates the identity of the users in online transactions to prevent any scams and impersonation. The certificates are of different types, and they are used for various authentication purposes. For example-
  • SSL/TLS Certificates are used to secure websites.
  • Code signing certificates to verify software integrity.
  • Email certificates to encrypt data and authorize email communications.

Certificate management is essential to maintain cryptographic information for security purposes which also includes storing, i.e., the certificates kept in a secured and centralized location to prevent any cyber threats.

4. Standards and Regulations

Certificate management is abided by industry standards, regulations, and practices. It is to ensure legal compliance, security, and interoperability of your digital certificate with the organization.

These regulations are required to help you receive secure services through certificates.

  • Regulatory Standards: The industries of healthcare, finance or government have some specific regulations which govern the use and management of your digital certificates to provide the protection for sensitive information and secured communications.
  • Assessment Practices: Some practices, like regular audits and assessments of your digital certificates, verify that they are adhered to security policies.

For keeping the effectiveness of your certificate in check, these regulations, policies, practices and standards should be followed. Such updates on certificates are supervised by certificate management.

5. Specialized Tools

Managing a digital certificate is complex, so some specialized tools are important to provide efficient certificate management.

  • Integrating with IT systems helps to enhance visibility and control over the certificate. Existing IT systems like network infrastructure, access management (IAM) systems, etc., are integrated to help monitor security.
  • Certificate management platforms are used to manage certificates across an organization’s IT infrastructure. They help automate processes like issuance, renewal, revocation, and more, reducing manual functioning and ensuring timely updates.

Automation also ensures that policies are enforced across the organization to reduce the risk of non-compliance.

Conclusion

Efficient certificate management makes your digital certificates reliable and secure. Continuous oversight from issuance to expiration provides measures to prevent risks and ensures compliance with regulatory standards. Such services maintain trust between the user and the organization in digital operations. Automatic updates save manual labor and enhance efficiency. In a vast and interconnected cyber world, certificate management is crucial and pivotal for the effective and secure use of certificates, ensuring your digital operations run smoothly and securely, whether you’re handling a home network or managing an office desk in a corporate environment.

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