Now that everything is on the internet, the prime objective of every business is to encrypt everything. This might sound like good advice after seeing how the online data is prone to external hacks. But setting up effective encryption is not simple.
Encryption of any data needs public keys and private keys, and a digital certificate necessary to revamp the security takes careful planning. Digital certificates and encryption are not something set-it-forget-it operation. You will be able to keep track of their performance.
Managing encryption on a business network starts with choosing the right digital certificates for your business. When the digital certificates are employed correctly, anyone using the encrypted network can be assured that any data shares cannot be intercepted by any data thief.
When using digital certificates to encrypt your business operation, you must go with only the best industrial practices.
Best Practices Checklist for Digital Certificates
The most basic error a business makes is choosing the wrong certificates for their businesses. If you have a personal blogging website, having a free digital certificate is more than adequate.
But if we are talking about a business website, it needs support and extended capabilities to secure its business. This can only be done with help from top-tier companies.
By now, you must have understood the importance of digital certificates for your business. Here are a few best practices that you need a checklist for digital certificates.
1. Document Every Digital Certificate
Do you know what the hardest part of mitigating digital certificate-related issues is? No! It is not about identifying the certificates but locating them on time. Unfortunately, when a certificate is distributed on several cloud platforms, heterogeneous environments, it becomes hard to pinpoint the exact location of the certificate.
Hence, you must be documenting the certificates carefully and keeping tabs on their movement. This ensures you with periodic reports on the states and statuses of the certificates.
2. Protect The Certificate With Private Keys
When a malicious element uncovers the private key, your sensitive data is compromised. In addition, this malicious element can impersonate itself as an organization server and can misuse the data. Hence, you must take care of keys, and instead of leaving your keys in your log, securely store them.
Restrict the access of the keys to a bare minimum of users. This practice will ensure fewer loopholes from where the keys might find their way to logs.
3. Make It Easy For The DevOps To Request Certificates
Agility is something that supports modern enterprise. With the ever-changing target audience behavior, agility in the business operation helps the organization match the pace. However, this very feature has created challenges for the teams to maintain the security of the digital certificates.
However, integrating the DevOps team member with the digital certificate makes it easier for the DevOps teams to request and provision new certificates.
4. Transverse CT Logs
CT Logs stands for Certificate Transparency. It is a program that maintains a log of all the digital certificates, certificate authorities, and domain users. This program helped the Google Chrome team identify the mis-issuance of over 30,000 certificates by Symantec.
You must go through the logs carefully and periodically to identify the mis-issuance of the digital certificates for your domain.
5. Automate Your Certificate Management
Experts believe that the majority of data breaches happen due to internal misconfigurations. This is because of the amount of manual work involved in managing and setting up the system.
With the increase of the complexity of the digital certificates and the widening skill gap, low code automation will help secure your organization’s digital transformation.
Final Thoughts
Finally, set up notifications and reports. While you manage hundreds of certificates for your organization, it becomes impossible manually o keep track of every certificate. Instead, you must automate the process and set up a notification to ensure your team has ample notices of certificate expiration in advance and deal with the situation accordingly.
The checklist for Digital certificates is playing a significant role in today’s world. They offer effective cybersecurity and ensure your online data stays behind the encryption. However, managing them takes dedication and focused work.