GlobalSign CA platform automates certificate management

Certificate Authority GMO GlobalSign has debuted LifeCycleX, its fifth certificate lifecycle management (CLM) solution, designed to help businesses centralise, automate, and protect digital certificate operations, preventing potential security risks.

LifeCycleX is a unified system that allows companies to gather and manage their digital certificates into one place, even if the certificates are from different sources including Public, Microsoft, and EJBCA Open Source CAs.

It manages certificates in multiple environments, and includes facilities for issuance, discovery, renewal, and deactivation. This should reduce the risk of downtime when certificates fail or expire. LifeCycleX’s API streamlines certificate management and automation, works with F5 and Netscaler devices, SCCM, Active Directory and Imperva, and can handle certificate management in containerised environments like OpenShift.

With the lifespan of TLS certificates being shortened to only 47 days by 2029, manual management will increase. According to Devan Rice, product manager at GMO GlobalSign, LifeCycleX addresses many concerns via automation. “Organisations can no longer afford fragmented or manual approaches to certificate management. LifeCycleX empowers IT and security teams with the visibility, automation, and intelligence they need to stay ahead of certificate sprawl and compliance mandates,” he said.

The CLM solution automates the discovery of existing certificates, maintains inventory, enforces renewal policies, automates provisioning, and delivers reports and alerts to users.

LifeCycleX offers a centralised place where businesses can manage all of their digital certificates, providing visibility into machine identities.

GlobalSign provides different levels of SSL/TLS certificates (domain-validated, organisation-validated, extended validation, wildcard, multi-domain, SANs etc.), plus certificates used for authenticating users, machines, emails and client-side applications. It also helps organisations manage IoT device identity verification, and acts as an accredited body issuing services under localised legal frameworks such as eIDAS in the EU and the company’s native UK.

Lapsed certificates can often cause system outages, and can represent a security issue – the 2017 Equifax incident was exacerbated by a company network monitoring device with expired credentials that was unable to track the veracity of encrypted traffic. That incident lasted 76 days and although the PKI aspect of the attack, which leaked millions of American’s personally-identifiable information, was not its root cause, the breach went unnoticed for much longer than it might have.

 

(Image source: “Locked Door” by Accretion Disc is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)

Want to learn more about Cloud Computing from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and co-located with other leading technology events. Click here for more information.

CloudTech News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.