SSL Certificate Management Challenges

SSL certificates are the hidden enablers of the internet. They encrypt and authenticate online commerce and communications. However, they present IT managers with several challenges, including:

Unexpected certificate expiry

The more certificates you have to manage, the greater the risk of overlooking a critical renewal date. The business consequences of a certificate expiring can be serious: at best, your website visitors get a security warning when they use your site. Worse, lost revenue can add up quickly if the expired certificate prevents transactions from being processed. Even if you catch the renewal, a last-minute “rush job” to renew a certificate that is near the end of its life is an unnecessarily stressful distraction from more important but less urgent tasks. Companies need a way to manage all their certificates in one place with a tool that allows them to make sure that they  get enough warning of upcoming expiries.

Time-consuming paperwork

Even if you manage certificates centrally, dealing with internal processes to renew each certificate as its expiration approaches can be time-consuming. This can become a very cumbersome issue  if you need to generate a purchase order for each certificate. Also, for Extended Validation (EV) SSL  Certificates, going through the validation process for each certificate can trigger a lot of extra  work. IT managers need a system that streamlines the purchase, auto-issuance, renewal,  authentication and management of SSL certificates.

Unnecessary expense

Because most vendors require you to pre-pay for certificates, there is a risk that you could pay now for certificates that you may not need later. Also, purchasing certificates one-at  a-time reduces  the opportunity for volume discounts with many SSL vendors. This problem is multiplied when  you need certificates on a short-term basis, for example to set up a test environment, or if your needs vary unpredictably. Traditional certificate management systems are not optimized for  this situation, and the certificate-pooling model does not provide flexibility to quickly issue new certificates without making an additional purchase, as the pooled certificate can only be used on a single server at a time.