What is Manual Certificate Management?

Manual certificate management is the old-school way organizations manage SSL/TLS certificates without any automation in place.

In this approach, the IT team will manually generate certificate signing requests (CSRs), purchase certificates from certificate authorities (CAs), install the certificates across servers, and track certificate expiration dates in spreadsheets/reminders.

Each time a certificate needs to be renewed, the organization repeats the same process, often creating copy-paste deployments and troubleshooting just before certificate expiration when alarms are missed. 

Also Read: What happens when your SSL Certificate Expires?

While manual management is fine for businesses with only a couple of certificates, the limitations of the method compound as organizations scale up.

When an organization has hundreds of certificates across different applications and cloud infrastructures, the difficulty of manual management and the consequences of expired certificates lead to greater risk of outages, security gaps, and compliance failures.

Manual management can lead organizations to exhaust IT resources that would be better spent on developed controls and/ or more strategic security initiatives, rather than basic administrative tasks.

Benefits of Manual Certificate Management

Complete Control of Management

When it comes to manual certificate management, directory administrators have complete control from the commencement of the certificate’s lifecycle when the Certificate Signing Request (CSR) is created until the ongoing lifespan of the certificate is finished when it is published.

All tasks from generating the Certificate Signing Request (CSR) to installing and configuring certificates on servers could be done either directly by the IT department or under their watchful eye, without resorting to automated workflows.

Complete control of management can add value to situations that require special custom security policies, compliance checks, or special configurations to be performed.

With manual management, the administrator has the opportunity to review each step taken and verify that the certificate was issued and deployed as they had originally intended.

They must also ensure the alignment and compliance with their policies, and take full responsibility for the certificate lifecycle and the management of their security parameters.

Low Cost for Small Organizations

For small organizations or organizations that have only one or just a few certificates, getting the lowest cost management of the lifecycle of one or two certificates is usually achieved with manual management.

Automated platforms used for management, or a subscription for a certificate lifecycle management (CLM) solution, will always create additional burden and expense to small organizations.

Management of certificates is usually feasible for a small organization without incurring the expense of a new platform for an enterprise’s certificates. Manual management does not require a cost of subscription service for visibility of renewal and installation for at least a couple of basic services.

If the organization has a small number of certificates, it is feasible to assign one of the IT department staff to monitor the renewals/expirations, generally with a spreadsheet to track expiration dates, or couple the expiration with alerts.

Flexibility in Execution

Manual processes allow for a degree of flexibility that automation will not always be able to provide, particularly for legacy systems or unique environments/infrastructure.

Certain environments may need unique configurations or deployment methods that are more easily completed through a manual process, rather than trying to adapt manual tools or systems that don’t cooperate.

Manual ways of managing certificates would allow IT administrators to adjust in real time, customize deployment processes, and troubleshoot along the way during the certificate setup process.

This flexibility will allow for a way to guarantee interoperability across different platforms, and organizations can more easily maintain consistency of operations without impacting automation tool capabilities.

This flexibility will become even more significant in specialized IT environments where managing, installing, and renewing certificates needs to be signaled as a noteworthy event.

Direct Awareness of Expiration Dates

Manual certificate management forces administrators to stay actively engaged through the entire life cycle of the certificate.

In many instances, administrators can track expirations in a tracking spreadsheet, calendar, or even some reminder system and environment documentation as well.

When working at scale, this can be a frustrating and repetitive task; however, smaller organizations (security teams) will benefit from executing this process and having some situational awareness of an upcoming expiration date.

This type of management forces teams to think proactively and encourages the team to better monitor certificates because they also have to think about the situation associated with SSL/TLS protection.

Moreover, this periodic engagement to manage certificates limits the reliance on automation and generates a sense of ownership and accountability, while allowing certain teams in smaller environments to build basic best-practice processes of governing (managing) certificates manually before any process requiring automation occurs.

What is Automated Certificate Management?

Automated certificate management refers to the method of using software tools or platforms to manage the entire life of an SSL/TLS certificate by relying on minimal human interaction.

Instead of relying on spreadsheets or calendar reminders to track important dates, certificate lifecycle automation tools provide a centralized dashboard to discover, issue, renew, and deploy certificates across many servers, applications, and cloud systems.

Automated tools ensure certificates are renewed before they expire, incorporate security policies, and provide a way to deploy certificates on a large scale.

Automated certificate management reduces the risk of outages due to expired certificates and the possibility of causing security risks due to misconfiguration when you reduce the number of manual tasks.

It saves organizations time and resources and increases adherence to compliance with industry standards.

For enterprises with dozens or thousands of certificates with scale automation provides reliability and scalability while providing better protection of enterprise digital assets.

Benefits of Automated Certificate Management

Importing

Automated certificate management improves the importing process by removing the requirement for explicitly uploading and configuring certificates received from other Certificate Authorities (CAs) or internal PKI systems.

Instead, automation tools bring the certificates into a centralized platform directly, all while ensuring standardization of formatting and deployments.

Also Read: What Is Certificate Automation? How Automation Helps Prevent SSL Attacks?

The reduction in setup time and inadvertent configuration errors means the IT team can now manage certificates across servers or applications with minimal effort.

By consolidating the import process, organizations reduce administrative effort and the vantage point of having an undivided view of their digital assets, enabling streamlined certificate management at scale. As a result, organizations are more prepared to support expanding security needs.

Tracking

Tracking SSL/TLS certificates manually becomes even more burdensome as organizations scale their infrastructure. Automated solutions provide centralized dashboards to monitor all active certificates, issuers, expirations, and usages.

The increased visibility of current certificates allows the IT teams to proactively determine which certificates need attention before an issue arises. Automated tracking reduces the risk of unintentional expirations, which can result in service interruption or loss of customer trust.

By ensuring certificates are continuously monitored throughout the lifecycle of the entire organization, businesses are able to support secure operations while preventing the costly consequences of service outages or noncompliance.

Administration

Automating certificate management reduces administrative effort by combining multiple management tasks into a single platform with role-based access control and enforced policy.

Instead of depending on disaggregated spreadsheets or manual reminders, administrators can now assign roles, delegate tasks securely, and enforce company policy (e.g., encryption or validity period).

A more structured approach can help reduce mismanagement and ensure best practices are followed consistently across all departments.

Centralized administration is more efficient because repetitive tasks are eliminated, so IT teams can spend more time on strategic security endeavors, not day-to-day certificate management.

Monitoring

Continuous monitoring is one of the greatest advantages of automated certificate management. Automated systems continuously monitor the health, validity, and compliance with respect to the certificates deployed across the organization’s infrastructure.

If a certificate is expiring, misconfigured, or has been compromised, the automated system can create alerts to notify the administrator to take action.

Continuous monitoring exposes the organization to fewer vulnerabilities by guaranteeing the trustworthiness of the certificates deployed and protecting the organization against downtime risks.

By receiving real-time updates or alerts, businesses can eliminate operational disruption or security breaches while providing a more consolidated defense posture against ever-adapting cyber threat vectors.

Accountability

Automating the process of certificate management improves accountability by producing a complete audit trail of every action taken on a certificate. Actions such as issuance, renewal, revocation, and policy changes are all logged with timestamps and available for IT teams to keep a clear history of office events.

Audit trails are often required for regulatory compliance, but they are also valuable for internal audits. In the case of an incident occurring, administrators can look back on logs to identify a root cause and troubleshoot the matter effectively.

In addition to compliance, this level of transparency engenders confidence in the organization’s security measures, showing that the management of certificates is transparent and demonstrably compliant with industry standards.

Difference between Manual and Automated SSL Certificate Management

Conclusion

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Assign protection within a few clicks of a mouse, whether your organization is a small business or an enterprise on the rise; Certera has the scalable security that your organization can count on. Check out Certera’s certificate automation solutions today to start using these protection tools!