When it comes to your digital certificates and your organization’s reputation with the public, good management can be the difference between your business flourishing or failing. The bottom line is that digital certificates are an integral part of your company. They provide proof that your business operates a certain way, which brings trust and reliability to your customers and the industry as a whole. Therefore, it is very important that digital certificate management be a high priority for every business.

There are many ways in which good digital certificate management can help your business. The first goal is to get full visibility into your digital certificates, identifying what really is most important, and then focusing on ensuring that they stay live and active, not lapsed, and never expire. However, often times, digital certificate management is seen as a low-maintenance job, because depending on how long your certificates last, you could have them up and running in five years. This means that you could be saving yourself money and productivity in the long run.

When it comes to managing certificates lifecycle, there are a number of different approaches that you can take. One option is for your IT department to handle them. This would certainly be time and resource-saving in most cases, but it does depend on your organization’s ability to manage large numbers of certificates. Another option is to outsource this responsibility, although this solution may increase costs significantly.

startup look into digital certificate management as part of the overall security teams. Therefore, it is understandable that you would want to outsource these services to a third party. However, while third party certificate services may provide some benefit to your business, they are not the only consideration. Your security teams will need to be involved, too. Depending on your security team’s level of experience, they may know more than a third-party company about how to keep your system protected. This additional knowledge and expertise can mean the difference between having your certificates up-to-date and having to constantly update them – and this can be a costly issue.

When it comes to security, one of the considerations involved with digital certificate management revolves around the issuing certificates. startup are issued by certificate authorities. Certificate authorities are organizations that purchase your business’s SSL keys (which allow you to transmit sensitive information over the internet) and then create and store them on secure web servers. Security experts say that there is usually a third party involved in the process: the identity issuing certificates, which also holds the private SSL keys. In some cases, the identity issuing certificates will be managed by the business (for instance, during application approvals), while in other instances the private key storage is managed by the organization itself. Regardless of who handles the keys, the process for issuing certificates can be rather complicated.

There are a number of considerations involved in the digital certificate management process. One of the primary considerations revolves around maintaining a backup. SSL relies on servers that must be regularly backed up, to ensure that your certificates can be restored in the event of server failure. This process requires communication between your organization’s IT department and the CA in charge of the SSL certificates; therefore, if your business is experiencing outages, it is imperative that you have communication with the CA before the outages take place, to ensure that your SSL keys are correctly backed up, as well as ensuring that your CA has your backups. startup of SSL certificates involves ensuring that certificates are not improperly shared, which can lead to outages in your business.

Other factors that impact digital certificate management include ensuring that your SSL private key is not leaking – a common problem for some SSL certificates. In order to correct this issue, the CA will often require an individual or team to audit the SSL private key. If startup cannot ensure that there are no leaks within the SSL private key, then they will likely not issue new certificates, as they may have incorrectly approved an SSL certificate for a site that was illegal. Lastly, certificate authorities are often required to periodically review and audit their records. If your CA is not audited on a regular basis, then they may not be capable of maintaining the integrity of your SSL certificates, which can lead to outages for your website.

Many businesses also experience digital certificate outages, which occur when visitors to a website do not have internet access, preventing them from viewing your website. Certificate authorities are able to solve these issues through manual certificate expiration notifications, which instruct users on how to renew certificates with them. The CA also provides a grace period, usually of one to three weeks, during which time the website will be unavailable to visitors. These outages are extremely frustrating to customers, and serve as a serious black mark against a business. To avoid these types of issues, CA’s should periodically evaluate their processes in relation to digital certificates and ensure that they are correctly maintaining and upgrading their certificates to keep their websites secure at all times.