Are you aware of the need for Digital Certificate Management? When you think about it, having your digital certificates stored, tracked, audited, secured and maintained is just like keeping your keys or your passports secure. The whole point is to have total visibility into all digital certificates, identifying what is vital, and working towards ensuring that they do not expire, not lost, and are always in full operation. However, often times, digital certificate management is seen as a low-maintenance job, because depending on how long your certificates last, you could have them in place for decades. There is a lot of time and money involved in maintaining your digital certificates.

For startups , in order to keep a single digital certificate in an off-site location for an extended period of time, it is worthwhile spending substantial amounts of money, both financially and logistically. In order to make this happen, many businesses have hired security teams who are tasked with scanning, storing, auditing and issuing certificates on a regular basis. As well as being expensive, this approach has many drawbacks, especially in terms of security.

Firstly, it can be very difficult and time consuming to keep your digital certificates safe. startups report that keeping track of multiple certificate authorities (CAs) and the activities that each of these CAs do every day can be overwhelming and confusing. You may not even know whether your certificates are being scanned and stored (keeping them safe) every day! It is extremely important to manage digital certificates according to a business case; by doing so, you can ensure that your certificates are kept safe and securely without any significant amount of extra effort.

Secondly, it can be incredibly costly to implement a good digital certificate management system. It will not only take considerable financial outlay to set up the required infrastructure but also ongoing fees to monitor and secure the system. Furthermore, it will take significant man power to monitor the activity and create reports on a timely basis. Many businesses simply do not have sufficient man power to do this. However, it is possible to avoid these problems simply by employing the right technology – and the solution is out there.

Thirdly, it is extremely important to protect sensitive data associated with customer relationships and personal identity. Most businesses store sensitive customer information (credit card numbers, for example) on database servers. Unfortunately, this information is not automatically encrypted when it goes into a database and stored on public web servers. If startups occurs, the consequences could be disastrous for a business. By automating digital certificate management, an entire business can be protected against these dangers simply by deploying the correct PKI solution.

Fourthly, manual auditing and monitoring do not always catch out an individual or team who is deliberately trying to defraud the company. Individual employees may also lack the technical skills to determine whether a website is secure. On a large scale, this lack of technical skills is easily solved by using digital certificate management solutions. The entire business can be protected against outages and hacker attacks simply by having one simple point of contact – an automated system which monitors the security posture of the organisation.

Lastly, manual audit and monitoring are often poorly suited for the larger organisations. startups will typically use IT professionals to manually inspect all of the digital certificates on a website. This may be fine for small businesses that have few individual customers or employees but the security posture of such a large organisation is unlikely to be adequately protected. By using the correct PKI solution, the organisation is able to rapidly and effectively minimise any potential threat from outages and other issues.

Currently, organisations are in the early stages of adoption of digital certificates. Large companies such as Google and Microsoft are adopting the use of certificates more actively to improve their overall security posture. However, it is clear that there is a real need for smaller organisations to take action themselves. By adopting gartner’s certification process, businesses can gain full control over the security of their digital certificates and establish a strong foundation to prevent future issues.