Dynamic Discovery and Inventory of IIS Servers & Certificates with AppViewX CERT+

As organizations grow, their IT infrastructure expands as well, whether on-premises or in the cloud. IT Admins are tasked with understanding the unique requirements, analyzing the implementation and finally deploying the infrastructure changes. This includes implementing PKI and provisioning digital certificates to servers for secure machine-to-machine communications, encryption and authentication. Furthermore, when organizations scale, the volumes of digital certificates in use increases exponentially and visibility and management of the overall certificate infrastructure become very challenging.

In this blog, we will demonstrate how AppViewX CERT+ enables dynamic discovery, management and automation for digital certificates and IIS servers, in particular, within a scaling organization.

Scenario

Let’s take a look at a specific example, where an AppViewX customer needed to discover, document and manage large volumes of digital certificates provisioned on IIS servers in their environment. Originally, they were using a PowerShell (PS) script to semi-automate the process however, it was time-consuming and the discovery process took a long time.

AppViewX Engineers analyzed the use case and recommended performing the discovery using AppViewX CERT+ in conjunction with PS (PowerShell), to accelerate the process.

With this improved implementation, the customer could schedule discovery to take place automatically, without an IT administrator intervening. Once discovered, the IIS servers and certificates were added to the AppViewX CERT+ inventory and the IT admin was notified (via email or excel spreadsheet). Additionally, using inventory management, the IT Administrators could perform server health checks, provision digital certificates to any server and map it to the desired profile with a push of a button.

Conclusion

Using AppViewX CERT+ significantly reduced the time and effort associated with discovering and building a comprehensive certificate and server inventory. The process of maintaining and managing IIS servers, including associated digital certificates within the inventory was also streamlined.

AppViewX CERT+ is a powerful tool for gaining visibility and control over your entire Certificate infrastructure — contact us today or request a demo to learn more!