A P PV I E W X .

C O M

Buyer’s Guide
for Certificate
Lifecycle Management

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As enterprises accelerate their digital transformation efforts, the enterprise IT landscape is
growing increasingly hybrid and distributed. Data and applications are no longer limited to the
data center. They now reside in multiple cloud platforms. On the other hand, there is also a
massive influx of IoT, mobile devices, and end-points into the corporate network. Securing this
exploding digital environment is a top priority for enterprises today.
Digital certificates are identities that help digital applications and devices authenticate
themselves and securely communicate with each other. However, the sheer volume of
certificates that enterprises use and manage today and their distribution across various
environments have complicated certificate management, which has in turn created significant
challenges in securing these digital certificates.

Simplifying certificate lifecycle management and securing the digital

enterprise
While there are many solutions that claim to simplify certificate lifecycle management, not all of
them are built to address the unique complexities of today’s expansive and distributed digital
environments. When evaluating a certificate management solution, it is important to look for
these key capabilities that truly make a difference.

Certificate discovery and managed inventory

The hardest part of mitigating a certificate-related issue is not identifying the
certificate, but it is often locating it on-time. When a certificate is distributed across
multi-cloud, heterogeneous environments, it is necessary to capture information such
as locations, owners, associated applications, expiry date, and signatures, diligently.
Post discovery, managing inventory and categorization of discovered certificates play
a major role in simplifying operations. Grouping of certificates and keys based on
specific business use-cases streamline operations.

Holistic visibility and analytics

In a distributed architecture, having complete, centralized visibility of certificates helps
proactively monitor certificates for expiry and vulnerabilities. By renewing certificates
on time and fixing certificate issues as soon as they appear, enterprises can eliminate
certificate expirations and the resulting application outages.

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Along with visibility, gaining actionable insights into crypto standards used in
certificates and keys can also help enterprises regularly track certificates that use
outdated or deprecated protocols and upgrade them to new protocols to avoid
non-compliant certificate issues.

Secure key management

It is because of certificates and keys that devices in the digital environment are able to
communicate securely with one another. Private key, in particular, is the gateway to
critical information. Any compromise of the private key will instantly expose valuable
business information to the internet and risk security breaches. To avoid private key
theft, enterprises must choose solutions that leverage vaults and hardware security
models (HSM)s for key storage and circulation. Using automation workflows to push
certificates and keys to multiple devices minimizes human contact with individual keys
and helps prevent encryption key compromises.

End-to-end automation
With increasingly complex certificate infrastructures and equally widening skills gap,
end-to-end automation has the ability to dramatically simplify and streamline
certificate management. With minimal training, anyone can translate their complex
business use-cases into easy-to-use automation workflows that can orchestrate the
entire certificate lifecycle management.
All certificate processes such as discovery, monitoring, renewal, enrollment,
revocation, and provisioning can be carried out seamlessly and efficiently with
automation, eliminating the need for dedicated resources for certificate
management.

Policy enforcement and granular control

To avoid misconfigurations and the resulting certificate issues, it is important to
regulate and audit access to certificates and keys. Establishing role-based access
control enables enterprises to restrict certificate access and allows only authorized
users to perform certificate operations. Defining and enforcing a uniform public key
infrastructure (PKI) policy across the enterprise also helps in standardizing certificate
processes and eliminate the existence of rogue, unknown, and non-compliant
certificates.

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AppViewX Certificate Lifecycle Management Solution
AppViewX’s single-window capabilities for detection, renewal, and revocation help centralize
certificate lifecycle management, thereby mitigating security risks and eliminating outages

Smart discovery
AppViewX CLM discovers certificates from various devices and applications across
hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud environment. Unauthenticated network scan as well as
authenticated scan of devices, certificate authority (CA) accounts and cloud
accounts are used to discover as many certificates as possible. Appropriate knobs
are available to balance discovery time and pressure on the network.

Central inventory and analytics

All certificates distributed into various devices and applications across hybrid-cloud
or multi-cloud environment come under central inventory. This central inventory
provides insights into certificate expiry timelines as well as crypto standards (e.g.
cipher strength, key size, TLS protocol version etc.) being used for PKI. This insight
not just helps avoid application outages by renewing on time, but also helps avoid
data breaches by regular enhancement of crypto standards.

Cryptographic and business policies

Admins are capable of defining and enforcing various policies for teams to adhere
to appropriate cryptographic policies for keys and certificates. These policies help
in enhancing and keeping the overall security posture of the organization. Another
set of policy (e.g. what type of certificate should be issued from which CA) helps
teams adhere to the business processes laid out by the organization.

Granular access control

AppViewX CLM employs a granular, multi-layer access control approach where
access to each functionality in the certificate lifecycle (discovery, monitoring,
renewal, issuance, provisioning etc.) can be configured based on a person’s role.
Certificates can be tagged with additional metadata and can be grouped according
to business need, application or team for easy management of access as well as
policies. User management and access control become further simpler after
integrating with corporate user identify and access management system such as
Microsoft Active Directory.

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 Secure key management
Keys are generated either on the target machine or in the hardware security
module (HSM). Automated certificate lifecycle processes further eliminate the need
of human access to the key - this avoids key roaming and any potential key
compromise.

Alerting, reporting and logging

Built-in alerts for various events like upcoming certificate expiry can be delivered via
emails for manual actions or via simple network management protocol (SNMP) traps
for automation. Pre-configured dashboard reports provide you with quick, focused
access to the data you need to monitor your environments.
Custom alerts and reports can be added as per the need of organization. Individual
users can also customize their dashboard as per their need. All important activities
related to certificate lifecycle or configuration changes are logged. These logs can
be transported into enterprise log storage systems for longer term storage as per
enterprise policy.

End-to-end Automation
AppViewX CLM automates the entire certificate lifecycle process right from
issuance/renewal of certificates to provisioning/binding of certificate to the
application that is using the certificate. This automation not just saves time and effort
but also avoids manual errors as well as potential compromises.

It's time to rethink your machine identity management.

Choose wisely
Trusted by one out of every five Fortune 100 companies, AppViewX CLM helps with
automated discovery, visibility into security standards and centralized management of
certificates and keys across hybrid multi cloud environments.

Scan QR code to learn more about how AppViewX can be your

partner of choice in your cybersecurity journey

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