Centralized certificate management may not be the first thing that comes to mind when considering the health of your enterprise’s digital environment. Yet, it is an essential component of scalable and agile infrastructure—too often, this becomes apparent when the need for a certificate manager becomes dire. If a decision to implement certificate management is long overdue, choosing one may become overwhelming.
Shopping for any enterprise software is not an easy task, but it’s especially critical to get it right when considering various certificate managers on the market. Finding the right one for your organization’s needs will go a long way in ensuring the long-term stability and security of your cyber infrastructure.
Certificate management tools are abundant, so analyzing each not only for its advantages but potential pitfalls is key. Below, we’ll go through several red flags that you would want to look out for when considering a certificate management solution for your enterprise. Given their critical nature, the six points below should be considered deal-breakers. Let’s take a look.
- No interoperability
First and foremost, the certificate management solution you choose must be compatible with certificates from any and all sources. It’s not uncommon that a given certificate manager can only handle certificates originating from the same vendor or a specific certificate authority (CA). This is an extremely limiting factor that most enterprises cannot work around.
Consider that an organization uses certificates from at least 7 different certificate authorities on average. This number can be much higher depending on the complexity of its cryptographic assets! The whole point of a certificate manager is to act as a centralized hub to monitor, track, issue, replace, and automate all certificates, including undocumented ones. The right solution must be able to discover and recognize all of them. If it can’t, it’s not the right tool for you.
- Limited scalability potential
The certificate management solution must be able to accommodate growth and scaling changes within your organization. As an enterprise grows, the number of certificates deployed in its systems scales with it, often dramatically. If the initial setup for tracking is manual (think spreadsheets), the teams responsible for it will quickly become overwhelmed. Manual tracking is difficult at any level. For a scaling enterprise, not only is it completely unfeasible, but it also amplifies the potential for human error, outages, and security risks.
Thus, the ability to handle operations with multiple certificates on a large scale—issuance, tracking expiration dates, renewal, scanning for issues, automation—all must be built into the solution you’re considering. If large-scale support is lacking, consider a different vendor.
Additionally, scalability often means operating in multiple environments. The right certificate manager should scale with an organization’s needs, making it easier to adapt to the growth, regulatory compliance, and a growing number of certificate types. If the solution cannot handle hybrid or multi-cloud environments, it won’t scale with even the most basic PKI environments. Requiring workarounds for mission-critical functions like that is a red flag.
- Lack of flexibility and integration capabilities
Just like any other digital solution deployed in an enterprise environment, a certificate manager has to integrate seamlessly into the existing ecosystem. Given that each organization’s infrastructure needs are nuanced and unique, a certificate management solution must be customizable and flexible enough to meet them. The key capabilities of a certificate manager must successfully solve direct challenges associated with PKI and be compatible with the IT and cybersecurity tools already in place.
This isn’t an easy match! It may be tempting to forgive certain features that don’t work flawlessly with your ecosystem, but it’s also important to recognize the potential for continuous manual intervention down the line. If integrating a certificate manager requires workarounds, they are all but guaranteed to be complex and brittle, exposing the enterprise to risk and security vulnerabilities.
Workarounds for correct integration and customization present more problems than they solve—not to mention that manual integration undermines the whole idea of automating certificate management from one centralized platform.
If the certificate management solution you’re considering…
- Has limited APIs
- Offers no support for DevOps workflows
- Is incompatible with modern protocols (e.g. ACME)
- Doesn’t allow you to set your own parameters for certificate validity periods
- Lacks policy customization options
- Is single-tenancy model only
…you should rule it out as your potential certificate management solution.
- Weak security features
Cybersecurity best practices and a robust security profile are the bedrock of PKI. Without the latest security protocols built into the potential solution, the risk of exposure to potential security vulnerabilities in the ecosystem becomes too high.
One way to recognize a weak security profile is to pay attention to which encryption algorithms the solution in question supports. Outdated ones, like RSA-1024 or SSL3.0, present a major red flag. Because machine identity management is central to security failure prevention, it has to be built with robust and up-to-date security practices in mind.
More weak features to be on the lookout for include limitations or the inability to perform batch revocations, lack of support for hardware security modules (HSMs), and insufficient security levels, i.e., low key strength. All these are reliable signals that the security features of the solution aren’t sufficient at an enterprise level and thus shouldn’t be considered at all.
- Limited compliance functions
Besides the complex internal requirements, organizations have an ever-increasing number of external pressures and rapidly tightening regulatory environments to contend with. More and more emphasis is placed on digital trust. Regulators have at last turned their focus to encryption. At a minimum, certificate management solutions must offer an adequate level of support to allow enterprises to stay on the right side of compliance, thus lessening this additional regulatory burden.
A certificate manager must offer features to support the now-common standards like GDPR and PCI-DSS out of the box. This includes automated audit logs, detailed reports, full lifecycle tracking of all certificates, compliance mandates for cryptographic modules, and more. The primary function of certificates is data protection, after all. If a solution under consideration lacks these compliance features, don’t use it.
- No human touch
Imagine you find a certificate manager that seems perfect in every regard, yet somehow does not include product support to fully realize its integration into your processes. This, too, is enough of a question mark to consider other options. Why?
The deployment of a complex solution like a certificate management platform has to be carried out with precision and integrated seamlessly from the get-go. Because few enterprises have dedicated PKI teams, the right vendor should offer implementation guidance in addition to robust functionality to ensure the design of a secure, scalable, efficient PKI for each client.
For an extremely niche aspect of the digital ecosystem like certificate management, robust customer support is a real need. Even top-notch tools require human expertise to reach their full potential.
Conclusion
Selecting a certificate management solution that’s right for your organization is a challenge given the complexity of both internal requirements and external variability of features, functions, and regulations.
Knowledge is power. Armed with the right questions and knowing the red flags to look out for, you can confidently rule out the wrong vendors and pick the certification management solution that will serve your organization well from the start.
