The Benefits of Enhanced Certificate Discovery for Your Business
Managing digital certificates has become increasingly challenging for businesses with certificates deployed across physical servers, virtual machines, cloud environments, mobile devices, and IoT endpoints. Certificates are used by multiple teams within organizations, but often lack centralized visibility and governance. As a result, many certificates go undiscovered, leading to security vulnerabilities from expired or compromised certificates.
To provide better visibility into your certificates, you need enhanced certificate discovery capabilities. An enhanced certificate discovery capability integrated into a certificate lifecycle management solution can provide a centralized view of all certificates in your company, including their locations, ownership details, validity periods, and more.
Traditionally, discovery involved manual scanning of individual systems and devices for certificates. However, enhanced certificate discovery utilizes automated discovery tools that continuously monitor all platforms for new and changed certificates. This article explores the direct benefits of enhanced certificate discovery for your business.
5 Benefits of Enhanced Certificate Discovery for Your Business
Here is how your business can benefit from better visibility into digital security certificates across your system:
1. Improved Security
Certificates are used to establish secure communication between systems, and if a certificate is invalid or expired, it can be exploited by attackers to intercept or manipulate data. Enhanced certificate discovery can identify and remove expired or invalid certificates in your network. By discovering all the SSL certificates in use across your organization, you gain visibility into vulnerabilities like weak encryption, self-signed certificates, or improper key usage that could be exploited. You can then take action to revoke, replace or strengthen those certificates, patch any systems relying on them, and update security policies.
2. Better Compliance
Most security frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, etc. require strict control and management of SSL certificates. Enhanced certificate discovery provides an accurate inventory of all your certificates in one place, with details on validity, expiration, and usage. This information demonstrates compliance by giving auditors a transparent view of your certificate program.
3. Enhanced Customer Trust
Valid and up-to-date certificates can build customer trust, as they are reassured that their data is being transmitted securely. With enhanced certificate discovery, you can easily ensure that your certificates are valid and up-to-date. And every time your customers see valid certificates on your website, they trust your business more.
4. Reduced Costs
Once you have a full inventory of certificates in one place, you can analyze them to find unused or duplicate certificates and retire them. This prevents wasting money on renewing or replacing no longer-needed certificates. You can also look for opportunities to consolidate multiple domains onto a single certificate to reduce future spending. Savings may be small per certificate but huge for a large enterprise.
5. Streamlined and Centralized Certificate Management
Having all your certificates and their details discovered in one console, you gain a single pane of glass to view certificate status, approve requests, update attributes, and manage the entire lifecycle from issuance through renewal and revocation. This reduces the complexity of bouncing between different systems and the possibility of mistakes from manual tracking in spreadsheets.
Sectigo’s automated certificate lifecycle management solutions provide a complete and detailed view of the certificate lifecycle for all your deployed certificates. This simplifies certificate troubleshooting immensely.
Enhance Certificate Discovery for Online Security
Enhanced certificate discovery is essential to maintaining a secure and successful digital environment for your business. By leveraging automated discovery features within a certificate management tool, you can inventory all certificates across firewalls, apps, servers, and devices, and identify any expiring, faulty or unauthorized certs. This comprehensive visibility allows you to pinpoint and fix security gaps and improve the performance of your encryption infrastructure. Prioritize certificate discovery in your IT strategy and take those first steps towards more streamlined certificate management.
