With data security becoming an indispensable element in today's enterprise IT operations, there's a pressing need for organizations to secure and monitor every authentication occurring within their networks. While user-to-machine authentication contributes to a large part of the picture, it's not the whole thing; there are many other types of authentication—web services involving the exchange of information between browsers and web servers for instance—driven by security certificates, or SSL certificates. Moreover, technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart card authentication systems are becoming increasingly common, which has resulted in the proliferation of SSL certificates among enterprises.
SSL certificates come with set expiration dates, a typical trait for ensuring security. Therefore, not only is it important to verify these entities are properly distributed among users and systems for uninterrupted access, but also to make sure each certificate is renewed well before its expiration date.
Failed certificate renewals interrupt browser connections and have been the source of unforeseen web service outages for many enterprises. Tech giants such as Microsoft and LinkedIn have fallen victim to service outages caused by unexpected SSL expirations, faced huge consequences including loss of productivity for their customers worldwide, and dealt with dents in their brand reputation. This emphasizes the importance of SSL certificate life cycle management for continued web service uptime, not to mention the threats to data security neglecting this task can cause.
Shawn is a product expert at ManageEngine with more than 11 years of hands-on experience in the enterprise IT security domain. He provides assistance with implementation, training, and support to customers around the world.
Key Manager Plus is integrated with ManageEngine’s Password Manager Pro, to provide unified privileged identity management platform.
ManageEngine’s Key Manager Plus enables us to stay on top of SSL certificates for all of our websites. With Key Manager Plus, we’re able to monitor which certificates are nearing expiration and roll out new certificates in a timely manner.Ken Odibe Senior cloud infrastructure consultant, Sapphire systems.