The role that digital certificates and keys play in securing your business has reached critical importance. The exponential growth in certificate usage has reached unprecedented levels; industry standards for certificate lifespans continue to shrink, and quantum-safe certificates are gaining traction.
On average, a typical organization uses 255,000 keys and certificates today to secure data and authenticate systems, and that number continues to grow yearly. However, over 77% of companies admit that digital certificates have and continue to cause unplanned downtime and outages. What’s more concerning is that over half of these same companies say that these outages, which take hours to resolve, have impacted customers negatively. These are just some recent examples and challenges that plague the minds of IT and security leadership.
Bottom line: security teams need to get certificate management under control.
And that’s why we’ve built this model to help. The broad scope of certificate management makes it hard to know how mature your current practices are today and where they need to be for the future. Each level in this model describes the most common scenarios we hear from the companies we work with every day. This model outlines practical next steps to move you to the next level and provides quick insights into your expected achievements.
Ways to use this guide
Self-Assess:
Start by understanding each maturity level and pinpoint where you stand.
Identify Gaps:
Define your success criteria and plan practical next
steps to address existing gaps.
Make a Plan:
Share findings with your team and involve leadership.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the five levels of certificate management maturity. By doing so, you’ll understand how to scale and automate the management of certificates across your organization (and keep your sanity in the process).
