Certificate Management
You need to go for the particular certificate management tool, which supports your specific business strategies, instead of developing your business strategy centering on your certificate management.
You need to look for maximum flexibility and control. But the question is how you will be able to identify the one that will offer you more or the most. Do not worry about that, because I have the solution for you.
Top 5 Questions To Ask When Evaluating A Certificate Management Authority
Here are the top 5 questions that you need to ask at the time of evaluating a certificate management authority. You need to make sure that you are covering all the aspects which are really essential and also unnegotiable for your business.
Will It Offer Certificate Intelligence From More Than One CA?
Almost every organization generally uses multiple CAs. But, using a single CA management console, it is impossible to manage machine identities and that too across multiple CAs.
This implies that the overall view of all your certificates and keys of your organizations will need ongoing manual effort, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Do you remember the days when you were choosing CRM software for the business?
How Quickly Can A CA be Changed, Moved, Or Added To PKI?
In case a CA implementation is compromised through corrupted or unauthorized access, a quick response is a primary requirement here for most organizations. CAS is not flawless, like all organizations.
Some may make some errors, which impacts the trust of their certificates in a negative way. So, the ability of switching CAs easily provides a critical security advantage. This is something that you can not skip or avoid.
Will It Help In Maintaining Consistent Security Across All Certificates And Keys?
Many business groups, who are requesting certificates, barely have any idea of provisioning strong keys along with certificates. They often go with the older and more familiar issuance practices, which may compromise your machine identities of yours.
In the case of managing your machine identities, you solely rely on CA; there may be a need of repeating an implementation of security policies across various CAs. I hope you will not want that to happen.
How Quickly Can Be Responded To A CA Compromise, Or Any Serious Error?
In case large groups of certificates are distrusted or disabled, it will make a number of CA customers crawl to find another CA for converting their certificates and keys.
In case you really want to change CAs, integration with security infrastructure, any automated process, and also the policies, which were developed with the help of the compromised CA, have to be rewritten.
Will It Help In Identifying, And Reacting To A Certificate-related Breach, Or Outage?
When you rely on more than one CAs, and that too without having across-enterprise awareness of your certificate and key security posture, there can be several consequences that you need to experience. You might not be able to detect and respond quickly to a misused certificate.
The scenario will be the same for unplanned outrage or any kind of vulnerability. The time is too critical when you are facing a breach or an outrage. The longer it will continue, the greater potential damage your organization will face.
Some More Questions
Though I have mentioned, the top 5 questions that you should ask while evaluating a certificate management authority, in order to help you in choosing the right one, here are some more questions that you should consider as well.
- Are there any scalability issues to worry about?
- What are the kinds of support or expertise that you offer?
- What are the requirements of infrastructure for this solution?
- How time-consuming or difficult will it be to use the solution?
- How quickly can the solution be deployed?
- What are the automation capabilities that this solution offers?
Bottom Line
For maximizing business agility, search for certificate management, which will let you manage all your certificates from a single console. You will not want to tie the security posture of your organization to a single CA vendor.
