Effective Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) management needs to combine ways of handling PKI infrastructure along with the recommended best practices. In many cases, management of digital signatures or certificates is not that widely understood and can often lead to an outage that could have been proactively prevented. This mismanagement of certificates can also impact safe and secure data security practices which can result in a serious breach–hampering an organization’s business and leading to reputational damage and revenue losses

With the integration of AI, hackers and tools being more efficient in cracking legacy encryption algorithms and rise of the post-quantum cryptography (PQC), management of certificate, keys, Certificate Authorities (CAs) and hardware security modules (HSMs) need to be handled in a secure and efficient manner.

If you’ve ever worked in IT or cybersecurity, you know that managing PKI and certificates can feel overwhelming. While PKI is the cornerstone of digital trust, it’s often treated like that complex piece of technology that everyone avoids until something goes wrong.

By identifying common pitfalls and tackling them head-on, we can transform PKI and certificate lifecycle management from a source of stress into a well-equipped security process.

Let’s break it down:

The Pitfalls

1. The “Set It and Forget It” Habits Can Be a Killer:

With the ever-increasing count of certificates providing trusted machine identities across an organization’s hybrid multi-cloud environments, most organizations face significant challenges to manage certificates effectively and efficiently. Although these certificates provide strong authentication and encryption as part of an organization’s identity-first security approach, PKI often lies in the backend and is not properly managed. In many cases, organizations lack proper visibility and ownership of the certificates and keys existing in their environment. This lack of ownership and visibility can result in vulnerabilities, security weaknesses and critical application outages.

AppViewX suggests: Treat PKI as a dynamic and essential system. Perform regular audits, updates and reviews to ensure proper management and maintenance.

2. Ever Increasing Certificate Sprawl

The number of short-lived certificates with stronger algorithms is continually rising and certificate management is now of utmost importance. In the CA/Browser (CA/B) Forum, Google and Apple are advocating for shorter validity certificates to promote the use of automation to management certificates and to improve enterprise security postures.

Common symptoms of poor certificate management: Missing documentation, lack of visibility into expiration dates, configuration errors, and the use of wildcard or duplicated certificates lead to the inevitable “Where’s Waldo?” hunt for PKI administrators.

AppViewX suggests: Implement an automated certificate lifecycle management process that provides visibility, a centralized certificate inventory and a map of ownership. Once you map out the “what” and “where,” you are better equipped to address critical certificate management challenges.

3. Avoid Manual Mayhem

Manual PKI and certificate management is like building IKEA furniture without the instructions.

The lack of visibility, automation and control, the foundation for crypto-agility, puts organizations at risk of missed certificate expirations resulting in vulnerabilities, security weaknesses and outages. Every organization needs to avoid these horror stories by moving away from manual PKI and certificate management processes.

Trying to manually manage thousands and thousands of certificates is no longer feasible and it is just a matter of time for human errors and misconfigurations to cause issues.

AppViewX suggests: You need visibility, automation and control of certificates across your complex hybrid multi-cloud environment. Modernizing your PKI and certificate management with automated CLM solutions will enable crypto-agility to help maintain security and compliance.

4. Expiration Nightmares

Just imagine that it’s the middle of night and you receive a phone call to let you know that a critical service is down because a certificate expired. As a PKI administrator, you must now renew and redeploy the certificate to get the service back up. Unfortunately, this is a scene that continues to play out in IT departments in organizations of all types and sizes.

AppViewX suggests: Don’t let certificate expirations create havoc and disrupt your work life balance. Use CLM solutions with automated expiration alerts and automated renewal workflows. This will eliminate certificate-related outages from occurring.

Solutions and Best Practices for Moving from Chaos to Clarity

1. Centralized Certificate Lifecycle Management

Maintain central visibility of all your certificates providing trusted machine identities. By using a robust CLM solution, you can have a complete certificate inventory and the ability to map out the ownership to eliminate human errors, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and expirations.

2. Automation Is Essential

You must modernize PKI and certificate management with automated CLM solutions and best practices. We advise all organizations to start with what is critical to their business, conduct an internal PKI audit, learn where you can implement automation and implement an automated CLM solution to centralize PKI and certificate management.

3. Education and Training

Even the best tools won’t help if your team doesn’t know how to use them. You must also invest in training so your staff understands PKI and certificate management best practices and the automated CLM solution they chose.

To learn more about PKI and certificate lifecycle management automation, please request an AVX ONE CLM demo today.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blogs Archive - AppViewX authored by Ashish Kumar. Read the original post at: https://www.appviewx.com/blogs/addressing-pki-management-pitfalls-from-chaos-to-clarity/