The 2023 CISO’s Guide to

Certificate Lifecycle
Management (CLM)

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What’s Inside?

Introduction............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
02

The Importance of Managing Digital Certificates and Keys......................................................................................................... 05

Key Certificate Management Challenges for Enterprise Organizations..............................................................

07

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Lifecycle Management................................................................

08

What constitutes improper certificate management?.................................................................................................................................10

The Solution...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 11

Simplifying certificate ownership and approval for efficient

certificate lifecycle management......................................................................................................................................................................................... 11

Seamless integration of certificate lifecycle management with

other enterprise solutions........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14

Real-time discovery, visibility, and monitoring of certificates................................................................................17

Certificate Lifecycle Management in DevOps and containerized

environments......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
18

Step into the agile world of the cloud with automated certificate
lifecycle management..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
21

Context-aware and state-aware....................................................................................................................................................................................................

23

Policy-based orchestration............................................................................................................................................................................................................................
23

DevOps-friendly..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
23

Support for containers and multicloud...............................................................................................................................................................................

24

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Introduction

In the modern enterprise, IT environments,

data, applications, and devices are no Gartner’s Cybersecurity Trends

longer bound by the confines of corporate 2022 predicts that by 2025 45

premises or data centers. They are percent of organizations

distributed across multiple private and worldwide will have experienced
public clouds and the edge. With network attacks on their software supply
perimeters fading away, traditional chains, a three-fold increase
security frameworks no longer function from 2021.
the way they used to, thereby putting
enterprise applications and data at risk.
Some of the top cyber threat trends

Moreover, as organizations continue on organizations need to watch out for in

their digital transformation paths, some 2023 are ransomware, Zero Day

struggle as they move legacy solutions to vulnerabilities, supply chain attacks, and

the cloud. Additionally, the increasing credential theft which remains the

number of regulations and strict Achilles’ heel of the threat landscape,

compliance standards do not make the contributing to 80 percent of

situation any easier either. security breaches.

There has been a rapid increase in ransomware attacks over the past few years. Statista
reported that in 2022 over 70 percent of global companies have been the victim of
ransomware attacks. In recent times, cyberattacks that have used ransomware as their
attack vector include attacks targeting the Colonial Pipeline, Steamship Authority of
Massachusetts, JBS USA, the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Medibank, Toyota Suppliers, Nvidia among many
others.

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These cyberattacks had serious consequences on businesses including financial losses
due to the shutdown of critical infrastructure, increased cost of goods and services,
and loss of money due to having to pay the ransom to the hackers and worse.

How do you bridge security gaps to

fortify digital transformation so that
there is no impact on revenue and
business growth?

As highlighted in a Forbes article,

Despite all the warnings and high-profile

breaches, the state of readiness for most when it
comes to cybersecurity is dismal. The need for
better cyber-hygiene is evident from using
stronger passwords, patching software,
employing multi-factor authentication, and
many other important security steps.

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The Importance of Managing Digital
Certificates and Keys

Digital certificates serve as proof of a Technically creating a CA and signing a

machine’s authenticity on a network and certificate is very simple. If it is being done
help establish and extend trust during for local testing, anybody can sign the
communication. These certificates help certificate without much effort. However,
validate machine identities and enable when the certificates provided by CAs are
them to communicate securely with other used in production, there is more to it.
devices and applications on the network Digital certificates, which serve as virtual
through encrypted channels. identities for both hardware and software
entities connected to the internet, can
With valuable data continuously being make or break a network system.
exchanged between applications in cloud
environments, containers, IoT, and mobile PKI is a framework that enables the
devices, it is important for organizations encryption of public keys and includes
to secure this machine-to-machine their affiliated crypto-mechanisms. The
communication. This is achieved by purpose of any PKI setup is to manage
protecting and diligently managing digital keys and certificates associated with it,
certificates. Digital certificates are used as thereby creating a highly secure network
identities for machines and are provided environment for use by applications and
by public and private certificate hardware. X.509 certificates and public
authorities (CAs). keys form the cornerstone of PKI, acting
as the mechanism through which
As the requirement for certificates grows cryptography can be established for an
– especially certificates that need to be endpoint.
trusted within the organization,
enterprises have to set up their internal
public key infrastructure (PKI) so that
private CAs can be created internally.

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