Full-stack solution unifies CA-agnostic certificate management, private PKI services and public trust issuance for seamless digital trust infrastructure

Organizations are experiencing increasing pressure to manage digital trust at scale, across multiple functions in IT. But enterprises often lack centralized visibility and control over their digital trust initiatives. Thus, companies are now exploring ways to manage needs across functions under a unified digital trust strategy. 

Enter DigiCert^® Trust Lifecycle Manager. Trust Lifecycle Manager is redefining the meaning of certificate management by integrating CA-agnostic certificate management, across public and private trust, and PKI services to deliver centralized visibility and control, prevent business disruption and secure identity and access.

Multiple IT functions face increasing need to invest in digital trust

The increasing need for investing in digital trust has been felt in every part of the IT organization over the last few years: 

• IT professionals in infrastructure and operations overseeing certificate management discuss the need to prevent costly system outages that can be caused by unintended certificate expiration, misconfiguration or rogue-issued certificates that aren’t tracked. These outages may get reported up to the board, particularly if they are in mission-critical systems that carry substantial financial repercussions. And while this is not a new goal, it was made more consequential when the CA/B Forum reduced validity periods.  Though the shorter certificate validity periods make certificates more secure, there is now more surface area in renewals and expirations to cover, increasing the IT burden.
• Identity and access management professionals similarly have more ground to cover.  With zero trust policies changing authentication architectures, and with the pandemic changing the landscape of remote work, there are now substantially more types of authentications and volume of authentications that need to be supported. Getting certificates provisioned to end users in an efficient and effective way is now paramount. And as with infrastructure and operations, the consequences of not doing so can be significant. Provisioning gaps for when employees join the organization; or breaks in application access; can affect productivity and drown IT support. Revocation gaps when employees leave the organization can create opportunities for breach.
• In SecOps, IT professionals are managing a growing threat landscape and seeing the future of quantum computing draw closer. In both cases, professionals are considering the question of how to embed agility into their cryptographic architectures. Improving agility allows faster response to threats, faster remediation of identified vulnerabilities and more complete preparation for the overhaul in keys and certificates that will be needed for the post-quantum computing world. 

Furthermore, in the State of Digital Trust survey,100% of enterprises said digital trust is important and two-thirds have switched vendors after losing trust in a vendor, while about half of consumers surveyed have stopped doing business with a company after losing confidence in its digital trust competency.

Against this backdrop, companies have been considering how to centralize their digital trust initiatives and bring them from being a utilitarian concern — e.g., who is responsible for certificate administration — to a strategic concern — e.g., how do we invest in the systems and processes that will best support our business goals. This is why some organizations are now creating the position of the Digital Trust Officer. At its annual conference in 2022, Forrester noted that this newly emerging position may be the natural evolution of career path for current CISOs. 

Introducing Trust Lifecycle Manager

To meet this strategic imperative for digital trust management, DigiCert is now delighted to introduce Trust Lifecycle Manager. Trust Lifecycle Manager is different from other certificate management solutions in that it not only addresses the need for centralizing visibility and management of both public and private certificates across the organization and across CAs (commonly referred to as certificate lifecycle management, or CLM), but it also seamlessly unifies CLM with the PKI services that govern private PKI issuance, from the creation and management of CAs and ICAs to the issuance of the certificates that govern user, device and server security, with integrations that drive these certificates all of the way to end entity and third-party application installation. This unified approach provides a comprehensive way to govern the full digital trust stack, backed by the support and services that contribute to digital trust resiliency. 

Trust Lifecycle Manager is redefining the meaning of certificate management by offering:

1. A full-stack solution — A full-stack solution with single pane of glass reduces risk of business disruption for mission-critical apps, while improving performance, handling, automation and integration.
2. The ability to deploy anywhere — Customers can deploy anywhere, whether in the cloud, on-premises or hybrid environments.
3. Self-service — Certificate profiles and tools help facilitate self-service issuance.
4. Deep integration — Deep integration into user management technologies and enterprise infrastructure for increased productivity.

Trust Lifecycle Manager is a digital trust solution for CA-agnostic certificate lifecycle management and PKI services that centralizes visibility and control over an organization’s certificate landscape, reduces risk of business disruption from certificate expiration or human error, streamlines operations with automation and configurable workflows, and increases agility for fast remediation or adaptation to changes in cybersecurity standards.

Trust Lifecycle Manager brings together:

• Certificate lifecycle management, streamlining IT operations with certificate discovery, management, notification, automation and integration.
• PKI services, streamlining identity and authentication with private certificate issuance for users, devices, servers and other IT resources, and management of the CA hierarchy.

Certificate lifecycle management

For certificate lifecycle management, Trust Lifecycle Manager handles everything from issuance to renewal with DigiCert’s best-in-class public trust. With Trust Lifecycle Manager, enterprises have every tool needed for digital trust management, including discovery, automation and integration. Trust Lifecycle Manager also relieves the IT burden, taking care of discovery and automation with notifications that direct attention only to items that require action.  

Trust Lifecycle Manager centralizes certificate lifecycle management with the following:

• Centralized visibility — Trust Lifecycle Manager is a full-stack solution to centralize visibility. It can integrate with existing user and enterprise technologies to support current business systems and processes. 
• Reduced risks — The risks of business disruption from certificate expiration are high — and costly. Reduce the possibility of human error with a modern solution to automate operations.
• Streamlined operations — With automation and configurable workflows, organizations can streamline operations to secure identity and access.
• Increased agility — Whether you need speedy certificate remediation or the ability to adapt to standards quickly, Trust Lifecycle Manager offers crypto-agility across your certificate inventory.

PKI services

Trust Lifecycle Manager combines certificate lifecycle management with PKI services, which assist with the management of identity and authentication at scale. Trust Lifecycle Manager’s PKI services deliver the ICA and private PKI issuance for managing identity and authentication of users, servers, devices and other IT resources, with flexibility and automation that streamlines demands on IT provisioning and improves adoption, productivity and security.

Trust Lifecycle Manager’s PKI services include:

• CA/ICA creation — With CA/ICA creation, enterprises get fast time to value.
• Preconfigured certificate profiles — Enterprises can benefit from a comprehensive suite of certificate profiles that support self-service issuance.
• Flexible enrollment & authentication — Admins have the option to use manual or automated enrollment, including integration with Active Directory.
• Integration with IAM technologies — Finally, Trust Lifecycle Manager offers a deep integration for seamless issuance to end-entities.

Trust Lifecycle Manager is a part of DigiCert ONE™ , which reimagines PKI with cloud-native architecture and container-based technology as the PKI infrastructure service for today's security challenges. DigiCert ONE offers multiple management solutions and is designed for all PKI use cases. Its flexibility allows it to be deployed on-premises, in-country or in the cloud to meet stringent requirements, custom integrations and airgap needs. It also deploys extremely high volumes of certificates quickly, using a robust and highly scalable infrastructure. DigiCert ONE delivers end-to-end centralized user and device certificate management, providing trust across dynamic IT architectures.

Partner with a leading provider of digital trust

Finally, with Trust Lifecycle Manager, you can consider DigiCert your partner to manage digital trust in a secure way. As a leading provider of digital trust, DigiCert can provide deep expertise on risk management and best practices to ensure that users have confidence in the security of the enterprise. Trends show that digital trust is becoming increasingly important as it both adds to the top line and protects the bottom line by reducing the risks of outages and customer churn due to loss of trust, and accelerating customer acquisition and driving digital innovation.

Trust Lifecycle Manager is available now. Register for our live event to get a preview inside. Learn more at https://www.digicert.com/trust-lifecycle-manager.