Enterprise-level management and control of SSL certificates
Managing Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates is critically important for enterprises and is becoming a larger challenge, especially due to the skyrocketing number of mobile and cloud-based applications and devices worldwide which are driving growing infrastructure needs. SSL certificates enable the verification of business identity as extended to a server, and encrypt sensitive data traversing between a web application and a web browser among other extended applications.
Unfortunately, until now getting comprehensive information on all SSL certificates, regardless of CA, across complex enterprise networks has been expensive, time consuming and resource-intensive.
SSL certificates deployed on both internal and external customer-facing applications pose a management challenge and an expiration risk, so in both cases certificate expiration surprises or installation misconfiguration can cause substantial embarrassment, service disruptions, increased support costs and lost revenue.
In response to that problem and in consultation with more many Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, Symantec developed Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center, a cloud-based service for enterprises with large numbers of certificates used for business authentication and data encryption on servers.
It automatically evaluates certificates nearing expiration and triggers alerts based on an administrator’s configurations. By reducing the risk of unknown or unwanted certificates on enterprise networks, it minimizes surprise certificate expirations or high-risk rogue certificates, and in the future, it is expected to provide policy compliance checking to ensure enterprise certificates discovered meet internal or regulatory policies.
Centralization and automation are an improvement over current scattered and manual SSL accounting processes in spreadsheets, which historically have been error-prone, did not effectively track all certificates, and presented an additional time-consuming burden on already swamped IT staff. Data visibility frees IT staff to perform other core duties and actually save time through proactive management. Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center also aims to add relevant capabilities to its feature set around automating SSL renewal and installation on a number of enterprise applications.