Organizations should prioritize automated certificate lifecycle management to maintain complete visibility and granular control over who and what accesses their network.
Managing certificates manually—distributing, renewing, and revoking them—quickly becomes tedious and error-prone, especially as your organization grows.
By automating certificate management, you can streamline the lifecycle, reduce overhead costs, and ensure every certificate is tracked and secured, significantly lowering the risk of external threats.
Digital Certificates & PKI
Digital certificates are managed by a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which governs the issuance and validation of certificates and their associated cryptographic keys. A PKI ensures trust by verifying that the public key in a digital certificate corresponds to the associated private key, enabling secure authentication for networks and applications.
Building your own PKI is expensive, complicated, and risky. One misconfigured certificate can undermine your entire network’s security. PKI management tools eliminate these headaches by automating certificate distribution, renewal, and revocation. They give IT admins complete visibility and control over their certificate ecosystem without the hassle of manual intervention.
Certificates for users, devices, and web services all have unique attributes and revocation needs. Comprehensive PKI services track every certificate, associated device, expiration date, and revocation status, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. Advanced tools even automate the revocation of expired certificates, preventing them from threatening your network.
With the right policies and configurations, you can block unauthorized access, prevent data leaks, and lock down your network.
Popular PKI Management Tools
Many PKI vendors are known for their capabilities in managing enterprise certificates. However, selecting the right solution for your organization doesn’t need to be complicated. Here is a list of vendors and their PKI certificate management solutions:
SecureW2’s Private PKI
SecureW2’s Managed PKI solution provides everything needed for seamless certificate-based authentication.
Our platform allows you to manage an internal CA customized to fit any environment efficiently. By establishing a root CA and creating as many intermediate CAs as needed for regions or groups, issuing end-user certificates becomes effortless, ensuring a secure and scalable certificate-based environment.
As an organization, you can automate certificate lifecycle management based on the real-time status of devices managed by an MDM like Intune. Our gateway APIs can integrate with Intune and other MDMs to provide zero-touch certificate issuance for managed devices.
For your unmanaged devices and BYODs, we offer an easy self-service onboarding technology or SAML-based Wi-Fi login.
Here’s what the certificate enrollment process looks like for managed devices.
Start by registering your application with Entra ID and creating a client secret and API permissions. Next, create a SCEP issuing intermediate CA, certificate template, and an issuing partner. Download the organization’s Root CA, intermediate CA, and RADIUS server root CA—Configure user and device roles along with enrollment and network policies. Finally, create the appropriate configuration profiles for trusted certificates, SCEP, and Wi-fi.
Click here for a detailed guide on third-party CA SCEP integration with Intune.
Red Hat
Red Hat offers a comprehensive operational PKI solution that integrates seamlessly with major third-party APIs and enables cross-platform and cloud application integration. Developers can customize enrollment types, authentication methods, and certificate profiles for distributed certificates, providing unparalleled flexibility.
Red Hat supports CRL and OCSP for certificate revocation, ensuring secure authentication by accurately rejecting revoked certificates. With an open-source LDAP-compliant server, Red Hat centralizes user profiles, group data, network policies, and access control, streamlining identity and certificate management.
Organizations should have experienced personnel familiar with its configuration and management to utilize Red Hat’s PKI capabilities fully.
Amazon Web Services PKI
AWS PKI offerings revolve around two products: AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (ACM PCA). ACM allows developers to generate, issue, and manage public and private certificates with AWS-based websites and applications. The certificates provided can be used to authenticate multiple internal entities’ identities and configured to secure multiple domain names.
ACM PCA provides a managed private certificate authority (CA) to manage your CA infrastructure and private certificates. It provides security, configuration services, and monitoring of your private certificates. The certificates are authenticated securely for users, web servers, VPNs, API endpoints, and IoT devices.
One downside to AWS is that private CAs are only available in one region (US West -Oregon). This would require organizations to set up a backup CA somewhere on-premise or acquire one from another CA provider.
DigiCert
DigiCert can offer different SSL certificates to accommodate any organizational structure and its specific needs. They provide a detailed configuration for every Platform/OS combination to equip an organization with the visibility and security benefits it needs. Based on an organization’s requirements, DigiCert can also accommodate a range of encryption bit lengths.
DigiCert developed the CT Log Monitoring service to monitor and track their certificates. However, it is a cloud-based software service, and the infrastructure doesn’t need any setup or maintenance over time. Network admins can monitor public CT logs provided by SSL certificates. The cloud service reduces the time spent monitoring certificate logs by providing email alerts for issued SSL certificates.
Global Sign
Global Sign’s SSL certificates are compatible with all major browsers and devices, providing security without compromising the user experience. Although they offer several different SSL certificates, let’s focus on IntranetSSL and CloudSSL.
IntranetSSL secures internal servers, applications, and IP addresses. It allows for configurations and customizations not permitted on public certificates. CloudSSL is a distribution service that allows cloud-based service providers to quickly and efficiently provision SSL certificates. Because of its ease, this lightweight solution is scalable for long-term provisioning for the organization.
The management software provided by Global Sign allows network admins to monitor and analyze all the internal and public certificates in one place.
Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS)
Microsoft’s AD CS PKI solution provides a platform for building and implementing a PKI that works natively with Group Policy (GPO) to deploy certificates on AD-managed devices. It requires onboarding software to provision the managed devices, but currently, no solution is available for BYOD devices. Additionally, the solution is not compatible with macOS devices.
Despite this, AD CS is still used in many environments today. This is primarily due to its ease of use and organizations relying on Microsoft infrastructure (NPS, AD, GPO). AD CS is losing popularity as its on-premise design can’t keep up with modern, cloud-first environments.
PrimeKey
PrimeKey offers a turnkey PKI Appliance and cloud PKI solution through EJBCA Enterprise, efficiently managing and issuing certificates for users, infrastructure, and IoT devices. With features like signed audit logs, role-based authorization, and HSM support, it delivers strong security, including flexible revocation via CRLs or OCSP.
While PrimeKey secures authentication with server certificate validation, it lacks integrated onboarding tools for easy certificate distribution, relying on manual configuration by IT staff or end users—an approach that can be inefficient and time-consuming.
Leverage SecureW2’s Managed PKI For Seamless Certificate Management
SecureW2’s platform lets you manage an Enterprise PKI from the cloud, backed by the certainty of a hardware security module. We are vendor-neutral, and network admins can identify users and their devices, easily manage and segment network access, and view security reports. They can create custom certificate templates and identity-driven issuance policies to control who has access to what within the network. We empower administrators to control and automate the entire certificate lifecycle, from issuance to certificate expiration or revocation.
As for managed devices, our API Gateways can easily integrate with any MDM in the industry with no end-user interaction required. Automate certificate lifecycle management through our onboarding software, which provides an overview of all the certificates issued to users and devices along with a CRL. This ensures expired certificates are revoked on time to prevent unauthorized access without manual intervention.
Our JoinNow MultiOS provides network access to unmanaged/BYODs through certificates to prevent the chances of misconfiguration and human error. Our onboarding software lets you connect your BYODs by provisioning certificates for safer network access.
Generate certificates for a range of use cases, such as client authentication, server authentication, application security, and code signing.
Explore building a fully managed PKI for your organization here.
