Page 100 - Cyber Defense eMagazine June 2020 Edition

Still Using Spreadsheets to Manage Your Digital

Certificate Security?

Here are 5 reasons to stop.

By Ryan Sanders, Product Manager, Keyfactor

The proliferation of devices and applications like IoT, DevOps and cloud has dramatically increased the
number of digital certificates in any given organization. Most of the applications and systems we rely on
today use digital certificates to authenticate and secure connections, which makes the task of managing
certificate requests, issuance and renewal much more challenging.

For years, InfoSec teams have relied on basic tools like Excel spreadsheets to track and log certificates,
but today’s certificate volumes, combined with its certain rise as more devices are added to the network,
make spreadsheets an archaic and error-prone system. From a security perspective, consider that even
just one missed device or server certificate can shut down your entire network or worse – lead to potential
breach.

InfoSec teams have options when it comes to certificate management tools. Most of those options have
the ability to discover and automate the lifecycle of X.509 certificates, yet many teams still use

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