Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) refers to the comprehensive process of overseeing digital certificates, including their insurance, renewal, monitoring, and revocation. Digital certificates play a vital role in cyber security, as they validate the authenticity and encryption of communications, websites, and software.

CLM is important due to the finite lifespan of certificates, necessitating timely replacement to prevent service disruptions and uphold security. Effective certificate management is crucial to mitigate potential risks such as loss, expiration, revocation, theft, or compromise, ensuring regulated interactions within a network. Employing CLM best practices enables organisations to maintain the security and reliability of their digital certificates, safeguarding vital data and mitigating adverse effects on their operations.

This continuous management can be challenging for organisations due to the sheer number of certificates organisations must identify and manage across the business. The use of dedicated management tools can help reduce certificate-related incidents by 90% and reduce incident processing time by 50%. C-STEM, along with our partner AppViewX, can provide the expertise needed to properly manage digital certificates.

The AppViewX CERT+ platform effectively automates and manages machine and application identities as an integral part of your cybersecurity strategy. It provides a centralised control plane to automate enterprise-wide certificate lifecycle management and achieve crypto-agility. This prevents security blind spots, eliminates outages, improves productivity and ensures compliance.

Key features of the platform include:

  • Scan and discover all certificates across hybrid-cloud/multi-cloud infrastructures and reduce the risk of unmanaged, rogue and non-compliant certificates.
  • Create up-to-date certificate inventories and gain visibility into the certificate chain of trust, location, expiration dates and crypto standards.
  • Automate complete enterprise-wide certificate lifecycle management at speed and scale from enrolment and installation to ongoing renewals.
  • Define and enforce enterprise-wide PKI policies and role-based access control. Generate reports and logs for easy audits and compliance validation.
  • Seamlessly integrate with public trust and private trust Certificate Authorities (CAs) to centrally manage all certificate lifecycle processes.
  • Deploy CERT+ securely on premises and in your private cloud, or consume it as a fully managed SaaS offering.

To find out more about CLM and how C-STEM can help your organisation, contact a member of our team.

Click here to read more about the AppViewX CERT+ Platform.