For most people, encryption goes hand in hand with PKI. And it is rightfully so. Over the last decade, it has become important to secure the communication channel with end-to-end encryption.
Enterprise has taken the whole encryption thing too seriously to ensure all their assets and information are secure. Today, almost every industry has employed x.509 certificates all across the network.
This shows that businesses understand the importance of keeping their digital data safe in today’s world. After all, history has taught us that even if a single certificate goes offline, it can cost millions of dollars to the organization.
If you are a business and looking for PKI solutions for your business, Keyfactor might hold all your answers.
Best Practices For The Certificate Management
If you truly want to get the best out of your digital certificates, you must streamline your digital certificate practices with the industry best practices.
1. Maintain Inventory
Your work is not completed only after scanning your inventory. Therefore, extra care should be taken to store the result of the scan. Furthermore, if you can categorize the certificates, it helps the organization to streamline the business operation. For instance, you may choose the group of certificates based on their renewal or production environment.
In addition, you might also group them based on their priority. This simplifies the process of tracking as you know which digital certificate needs most of your attention.
2. Obtain Visibility
It is important that you know every certificate in your inventory, like the back of your hand. This means you need to run period scans and map them to the endpoints they are installed. This practice ensures that you can simplify future certificate operations.
While scanning the certificates to know their status, care should be taken to ensure that they are in a batch of a subnet. Furthermore, you must implement the cooling period to avoid network loads.
3. Protect Private Keys
No matter how you store your private keys of the certificates, you must ensure that there is no human activity in operation. More human activity means more chances of errors in certificate management.
Furthermore, when you reduce the interaction of humans in the certificate management and handling of the private keys, you reduce the chances of cyber theft and data loss scenarios.
4. Enforce Policy
While organizational policies are in place, you need a way to enforce the police automatically. For instance, you may choose to define the renewal mechanism of the certificates when they have completed 90% of their life. Having such a rule will ensure that ye policies are enforced, and the certificates are renewed quickly.
If you have contracts with the certificate authorities, the automation process will implement a bulk replacement and provide a hedge against all the risk factors associated with CAs.
5. Enable End-To-End Monitoring
Despite having a fully automated system for certificate management, the PKI structure needs human intervention to constantly look for weak links in the system. Here you can use the dashboard that tracks the redundancy and expiry of the certificates.
Another way to drill down the monitoring is by creating reports on the status of certificate groups. This helps the team to remain informed about the matter of the certificates.
Challenges You Can Face While Managing Certificates
As it is apparent that managing certificates are not a simple task, several teams follow a set of manuals to ensure everything goes well. However, despite following the manual, mistakes do happen.
While the obvious problem with certificate management is to manage thousands of certificates, it also comes with the following challenges.
- Insecure Private Key Storage: Holding the private keys in an unsecured location invites the possibility of data being breached and private keys being stolen by hackers.
- Clouded Visibility: Maintaining thousands of digital certificates makes your vision clouded, resulting in you missing out on some of the certificates. This makes it hard to locate the certificate and maintain it to prevent any unexpected expiry date.
The Bottom Line
There you have it. These are the best practices you need to follow if you want to successfully manage all your certificates. We have tried to keep the explanation simple so that you can understand without any issue. However, even if there is something that you do not understand, feel free to let us know. We will get to you with a complete explanation.
