Efficient certificate management is important for establishing and protecting your business identities.
The problem is that manual certificate management is time-consuming and resource-intensive, particularly in larger enterprises who require a large number of certificates.
The good news is certificate management can be streamlined with automated solutions that handle the entire lifecycle on your behalf while ensuring that your certificate infrastructure is well maintained.
In this guide, we introduce you to the benefits and return on investment (ROI) of automated certificate management for your enterprises. We will also help you calculate the ROI of deploying certificate automation solutions and how to propose the idea to stakeholders.
The Challenges of Manual Certificate Management
Manual certificate management introduces various challenges to your business, which include:
Complexity and Scale
Manual certificate management can be quite complex, especially when managing a large number of certificates. Your employees will have a hard time keeping track of certificates that need to be issued, removed, or renewed.
Not to mention, manual certificate management is very hard to scale, both from a managerial and cost perspective.
Human Error and Risk
With so many certificates getting issued, expired, or revoked, human error is inevitable. Think about it: your IT team members probably have a lot on their plates already. Add to that the headache of managing certificates manually, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster.
An expired certificate could go unnoticed, leading to security threats and downtime. New users or devices could spend days or even weeks on your network without being noticed.
Operational Inefficiencies
Manual certificate management causes operational inefficiencies that hinder productivity and hold back business growth. For example, manual certificate issuance can slow down the onboarding process for new hires. Moreover, expired certificates can disrupt your processes and expose your systems to cyber threats.
What is Automated Certificate Management?
Automated certificate management is the process of managing digital certificate lifecycles automatically and maintaining the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in your organisation.
Automated certificate management automatically issues new certificates for users or devices that are newly added to your network. It also revokes compromised certificates automatically and keeps track of certificate expiration dates, sending reminders and making recommendations on their renewal.
Key Features
Automated Renewal
Automated certificate management solutions automatically renew digital certificates that are about to expire, preventing extended downtime and maintaining security and service availability for users or customers.
Centralised Management
ACM managers provide a centralised platform that enables you to provision certificates in a single pane of glass with complete visibility, making it easier to detect problems, control access permissions, and make informed security and compliance decisions.
Policy Enforcement
You may already have policies for certificate management and identity protection in place, but without a way to enforce them, there’s no guarantee that your team will comply. Certificate automation facilitates adherence to data protection and identity management policies with access permission controls, automated certificate revocation, and non-compliance alerts.
What are the Financial Benefits of Certificate Automation?
Certificate automation brings a plethora of benefits to your enterprise, which include:
Cost Savings
Certificate automation can save your organisation a ton of money. Manual certificate management means that your employees will spend a good portion of their working days doing mundane tasks that don't add value to your company.
With certificate automation, you won't need to hire more IT staff to maintain your certificate lifecycle process. Further, certificate automation can lead to indirect cost savings as IAM solutions have built-in security features like proactive threat detection and monitoring, meaning that your cybersecurity spending will decrease.
Reduced Downtime
A single compromised or expired certificate can lead to extended downtime for your website, affecting user experience and damaging your company's reputation and reliability. Automated certificate management ensures that all certificates are intact and secure to prevent downtime and service disruption.
Improved Resource Allocation
With certificate management out of the way, you can redirect your resources to more important business strategic initiatives instead of wasting them on redundant certificate management tasks. Your team will be able to focus on their core projects and tasks, ensuring that their productivity isn’t hindered due to certificate management.
Strategic and Operational Advantages
Automated certificate management solutions provide your enterprise with strategic and operational benefits that go beyond time-saving. These include:
Enhanced Security
Certificate automation solutions are built with security from the ground up. They feature proactive threat monitoring and incident response that enables you to take preventative actions. Compromised certificates are detected and removed from your network in real time to prevent further damage.
Scalability
Certificate automation solutions can be easily scaled as your certificate management needs grow. No matter how many new users or devices are added to your network, certificate automation platforms can easily accommodate them.
Compliance and Reporting
Certificate automation makes it easier to meet compliance requirements with automatically generated reports that give you a holistic overview of all certificates on your network.
What is the ROI of Certificate Automation Management?
ROI Calculation Framework
To calculate the ROI of certificate automation, consider time savings, cost reduction, and risk mitigation. The key metrics and KPIs are average certificate issuance time, incident response time, system uptime, and certificate expiration rate.
Here's a simplified example for calculating Certificate Automation Manager ROI:
Time Savings:
- Certificate issuance: Automating 500 certificates saves 5500 minutes annually.
- Certificate renewal: Automating 320 server renewals saves 3520 minutes annually.
- Operations (discovery, revocation, validation): Automating these for 320 web servers saves 27,520 minutes annually.
Cost Savings:
- Employee cost per minute: $1.50.
- Issuance and renewal savings: 9020 minutes × $1.50 = $13,530.
- Operations savings: 27,520 minutes × $1.50 = $41,280.
Risk Avoidance:
- Preventing 10 annual certificate-related outages, each costing $100,000, saves $1,000,000.
Total Savings:
- Combined savings: $13,530 + $41,280 + $1,000,000 = $1,054,810.
ROI Calculation:
- With an implementation cost of $200,000 annually, ROI is:
ROI = (1,054,810−200,000) × 100 = 427.4%
What is our Business Case for Automation?
To propose the adoption of automated certificate management in a large enterprise, you need a detailed business case that highlights cost savings, efficiency gains, risk mitigation, and compliance benefits.
Identifying Stakeholders
Identifying key stakeholders, such as IT managers, security officers, compliance officers, executive leadership, partners and investors is crucial for successfully deploying certificate automation with minimal friction.
You can engage stakeholders by mapping the organisation’s hierarchy and tailoring messages to each group’s priorities.
Presenting the Benefits
Demonstrate the key benefits of certificate automation, highlighting cost savings, increased productivity, risk mitigation, better security, and proactive detection of certificate problems and threats.
Overcoming Objections
To overcome objections, address cost concerns by highlighting long-term savings and ROI.
Further, it’s important to take job displacement fears out of the way by showing how automation allows your team to focus on strategic tasks instead of redundant tasks. Here, it’s important to provide tangible results from other real-world scenarios through case studies.
Conclusion
Certificate automation reduces security risks, keeps your team productive, and eliminates many of the problems associated with manual certificate management like downtime, process disruption, and human error.
Reach out to us to learn more about the benefits of certificate lifecycle automation.
