Data Sheet

Locate, Monitor and Manage All SSL/TLS Certificates

SSL/TLS certificates have been used to secure machine-to-machine (M2M) communications for decades. The certificates are used to authenticate and secure interactions between machines. With the acceleration of digital transformation and new security standards for shorter-lived certificates, the use of TLS certificates has skyrocketed.

Machine types include physical (servers, load balancers) and virtual (web servers, virtual machines, APIs, cloud applications). These machines are used in countless ways and have widely disparate lifespans. Each of these machines needs the ability to authenticate every transaction so they can communicate securely. Machines use TLS machine identities to do this.

The unprecedented expansion in the number of machines requiring TLS identities, the increasing speed at which these identities are being created and changed, and the growing variety of machine types that need identities to communicate securely make it increasingly difficult to manage and protect M2M communication. According to a recent study, not only is the share of M2M connections expected to jump from 33% of all connections in 2018 to 50% in 2023, M2M connections are the fastest-growing category of secure connections, “growing nearly 2.4-fold (19% CAGR)” between 2018 and 2023.¹

Why use TLS Protect Cloud to manage TLS certificates?

• Maintain a Real-Time, Accurate Inventory
  • Continuous, automated monitoring of your most important certificates is the first step toward preventing certificate-based outages.
• Automate Alerts to Application Owners
  • Notify application owners when certificates they care about are nearing expiration and need to be replaced. No more mass emails to certificate owners that are ignored or found irrelevant.
• Enforce Security Policies for Issuance
  • Create issuing templates to simplify user workflows and enforce security policies such as CA and certificate attributes (e.g., validity length) by application.
• Automate Renewals
  • Eliminate the risk of human error by automating certificate renewals using API tools to install and configure certificates for load balancers, webservers and more.
• Ensure Crypto Agility
  • If any TLS certificates have been compromised or untrusted, adjust configurations (e.g., CA or algorithms) with search to quickly identify, locate and replace these certificates.

Key Features

TLS Protect Cloud^TM is a cloud-native platform that automates the discovery and continuous monitoring of TLS certificates, both internal and external to your network, anywhere in the world. Applying best practices outlined in NIST SP 1800-16, TLS Protect Cloud operationalizes the management of TLS machine identities with automated notifications to application owners and issuing templates to apply security policies to certificates issued from integrated third-party certificate authorities (CAs).

1. Discover all certificates
   • Continuously discover of all TLS certificates across your extended network automatically.
2. Catalog a complete inventory
   • Group certificates according to the technology, applications, teams and business units they support.
3. Assign ownership
   • Inform the right people at the right time based on the certificates that impact their applications or business units.
4. Verify security compliance
   • Ensure all certificates have proper ownership, attributes and configuration from the CAs you have chosen and vetted.
5. Automate renewals
   • Eliminate risk of human error by automating certificate renewals, so you can install, configure and validate certificates in seconds.

Try TLS Protect Cloud for free to manage your TLS certificates and stop future certificate outages.

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REFERENCE

1. Cisco. Cisco Annual Internet Report (2018-2023). 2020.