Automating Digital Certificate Lifecycles with AppViewX

We rely on web applications for nearly every aspect of our personal and professional lives — from shopping and entertainment, to conducting complex B2B transactions and sending and receiving payments. Naturally, every time we interact with a website, we need to make sure that it’s authentic, and the vendor or business partner we are dealing with is indeed who they claim they are. Digital Certificates are a popular way to validate organization’s credentials, and ensure that our communication with them remain private and secure.

Technically, the process of obtaining and distributing digital certificates is not at all complicated — you gather the information required for the certificate, request one from the Certificate Authority (CA), the CA verifies your identity and generates the requested certificates and corresponding keys. Then you deploy and configure certificates, and write down somewhere which devices received them, and how soon they need to be renewed.

But now imagine having to do this for every device on your network. Picture a day in a life of a SecOps engineer who is inundated with hundreds of requests for digital certificates, especially in environments with lots of IoT devices and complex, multi-cloud, multi-vendor networks. What happens when you discover that your certificates lack adequate security, are not compliant with industry online data protection regulations, are obsolete, or are in urgent need of renewal? Who is in charge of maintaining an accurate certificate inventory, and whose fault is it if the service goes down due an expired certificate?

With so much riding on availability and performance of digital certificates, it’s no surprise that many companies are turning to automation, replacing outdated manual processes with modern practices and tools for end-to-end automated certificate lifecycle management (CLM).

Automating CLM with AppViewX

AppViewX gives you complete visibility into all the certificates you have across the endpoints on your network, so you never have to search for a specific certificate or guess which one might be causing a problem. With capabilities such as automated certificate discovery, expiry alerts, certificate issuing, provisioning, renewal, and revocation, AppViewX gives you a platform for building a secure, consistent, compliant, and reliable PKI infrastructure. With AppViewX, you will never be caught off-guard with an outage that’s caused by an expired certificate which SecOps didn’t even know existed — instead, organizations can rely on AppViewX to help them keep track of everything that’s going on with their digital certificates, and monitor and manage them to prevent outages and lapses in security.

Integrating AppViewX into your certificate management infrastructure

Many organizations already have tools that do some form of certificate management. So, what do you do if you want to keep the tools that you have already invested in, but still would like to add end-to-end CLM capabilities? AppViewX is designed to interact and integrate with your existing tools — it can use the information from 3rd party products to discover certificates.

Here are some of the key differences between AppViewX and tools that provide only certificate management capabilities:

• AppViewX not only manages certificates — it automates the entire CLM process
• AppViewX provides notification of impending certificate expiry to help prevent network outages
• AppViewX pushes the certificate to the end-devices (servers, load balancers, etc.) and constantly monitors these certificates to ensure they remain in synch with their corresponding devices

AppViewX provides an orchestrated workflow which automates the certificate discovery process, including getting input from external tools. It securely manages the tools’ credentials in the password vault — which allows it to interact with devices directly to discover certificates. It also integrates with a number of NetOps automation solutions though APIs to help incorporate certificate management into network operations processes.

So, even if you have thousands of certificates that are managed by 3rd party tools and are about to expire, AppViewX can run a workflow that discovers them in seconds, filter them based on proximity to expiry date, renew them, and push them out to their respective devices. If desired, AppViewX would also send an email notification to all stakeholders, informing them of the certificate discovery status.

AppViewX would also monitor your certificates to keep you informed on the status, so you are never in the dark when it comes to your certificate status and are always informed if there’s a certificate-related issue that’s threatening your applications’ availability.

AppViewX automates the entire certificate lifecycle for the modern enterprise and helps you maintain the level of online trust required by your customers and busines partners. It automatically performs all the steps required for certificate discovery, management, monitoring, and maintenance, and integrates with your existing toolset to allow you to preserve your investment, while enjoying advanced end-to-end certificate lifecycle automation and orchestration.

To learn more, visit: https://www.appviewx.com/