The adoption of BYOD and IoT makes certificate management even more critical than ever. If employees bring and use their devices to work, they must connect to the company’s network. It’s essential to make sure every person and machine possesses a certificate, so every connection is identifiable.
New breaches happen all the time. When you go back and look, a lack of cryptographic security caused a lot of these breaches. Either stolen keys or expired certificates caused an outage or prevented a breach from being detected.
If you don’t have a complete picture, then you can’t address the problem. It’s not the keys and certificates that you know about that cause an outage — It’s the ones you don’t know.
Here you’ll find a high-level overview of digital certificates, the need for certificate management, and the process of certificate lifecycle management. The aim is to provide you with answers and to link to additional resources to answer the following question:
- What is a Digital Certificate? Why are they important? And how do you get one?
- What is Certificate Management, and how does it work in a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)?
- When and how to implement a Certificate Management strategy?
- Where can you learn more about Certificate Management and related topics?
First, let’s back up a bit to cover the basics.