Organizations today operate in dynamic and fast-paced environments, where multiple cross-functional teams are working together to develop, deploy, and manage infrastructure, cloud services and applications. These teams need digital certificates at nearly every stage for various purposes and at different times. The responsibility of issuing and managing these certificates often falls on the shoulders of either security or operations teams.

As businesses expand across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures, the demand for certificates has surged dramatically. Users now require certificates at speed and scale. But here’s the challenge: most security and operations teams have limited resources and are already juggling multiple priorities. Managing certificate requests manually—whether it’s issuing, provisioning, or renewing them across diverse teams and timelines—becomes an overwhelming burden. The processes are time-consuming and introduce serious inefficiencies into the certificate lifecycle management (CLM) process.

The risk doesn’t stop at inefficiency. When delays occur, some users may bypass established processes, procuring certificates from unauthorized Certificate Authorities (CAs) or resorting to self-signed certificates that do not comply with organizational security policies. These untracked certificates often fly under the radar, leaving security teams blind to potential vulnerabilities, outages, and compliance issues.

Managing certificates across cross-functional teams is certainly a challenge, but there’s a smarter way to do it.

The Solution – Certificate Management Self-Service

The growing complexity of certificate lifecycle management calls for a solution that simplifies certificate operations for every user in your organization. This is where certificate management self-service comes in.

Imagine this self-service capability as a self-checkout station at your favorite store: intuitive, efficient, and designed to let you handle things on your own without waiting in line. With certificate management self-service, users can independently request, renew, or manage certificates quickly and securely without any bottlenecks by enabling role-based access control and following enterprise-wide PKI policies. It also gives security and operations teams the control they need to ensure users only access the certificates they are authorized to use, maintaining security standards. By enabling self-service, you can democratize certificate lifecycle management, empowering your teams while ensuring efficiency and compliance across the organization.

AppViewX AVX ONE CLM – Certificate Management Self-Service Capabilities

AppViewX AVX ONE CLM is a ready-to-consume, scalable certificate lifecycle management (CLM) solution that automates all certificate processes end-to-end. You can discover, inventory, monitor, automate, and control the complete certificate lifecycle, all through a central console. With visibility, automation, and policy control of certificates and keys, AVX ONE CLM streamlines certificate lifecycle management and enables crypto-agility, minimizing the risk of outages and security breaches.

AVX ONE CLM enables certificate management self-service through a robust and intuitive user portal designed to streamline and optimize certificate operations for users across the organization. Featuring custom branding, personalized dashboards, automation capabilities, role-based access control (RBAC) and strong PKI policies, it enables cross-functional teams and users to independently generate, request, and issue InfoSec-approved certificates on their own.

How AVX ONE CLM Enables Certificate Self-Service

Certificates serve a wide range of organizational use cases, including trust, encryption, device authentication, secure cloud application access, application delivery, VPN access, and more. Consequently, different teams and users—such as IT, DevOps, cloud operations, and IAM teams—have varying requirements for managing and monitoring certificates throughout their lifecycles. Some may only need basic management capabilities, while others require advanced capabilities to oversee certificates across numerous endpoints, applications, and services. AVX ONE CLM recognizes these diverse needs and delivers self-service solutions designed to meet the specific requirements of each team.

AVX ONE CLM offers a low-code page builder that enables PKI administrators to easily create custom self-service pages for different teams and user roles. This intuitive tool requires no advanced technical skills—administrators can simply drag and drop desired features to create role-specific interfaces, ensuring users interact only with what’s relevant to them based upon RBAC and policies.

For example:

• A Systems Administrator managing a limited number of certificates to secure communication between a few internal servers would benefit from a simplified interface offering basic functions like certificate enrollment and renewal.
• An Application Security Engineer overseeing certificates across multiple web applications, APIs, containers and microservices might need a more advanced interface. This interface could include capabilities such as certificate expiry tracking and automated workflows for requesting, renewing, provisioning, and revoking certificates.

For more advanced customizations, administrators can even design and integrate HTML web pages into self-service pages, offering a seamless and highly personalized experience for users, aligning with a company’s branding or unique service offerings.

The intuitive design of AVX ONE CLM’s self-service pages ensures that users can easily navigate the system and access services tailored to their needs. These pages can also be shared among team members for enhanced team collaboration. Shared access ensures that all stakeholders stay aligned, improving communication and driving operational efficiency.

An important factor to address when implementing certificate management self-service is managing the multi-CA ecosystem. Organizations generally rely on multiple Certificate Authorities (CA), including both public and private CAs. However, setting up dedicated access to multiple CA management consoles complicates processes. Users must learn to navigate various interfaces and platforms to manage certificates from different CAs, resulting in inefficient and fragmented certificate management. This approach also increases the risk of non-compliant certificate issuance with users juggling with separate platforms.

AVX ONE CLM eliminates this complexity with a unified platform that integrates seamlessly with all leading public and private CAs. This allows PKI and InfoSec teams to centralize and streamline access and management for cross functional users through self service. Acting as a single pane of glass, AVX ONE CLM simplifies processes, allowing your teams to work smarter, not harder.

Why Certificate Management Self-Service Matters

Enabling certificate management self-service, guided by RBAC and strong PKI policies, is a powerful way to streamline the Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) process while empowering teams across your organization to become self-sufficient. From developers to IT admins, everyone can access the certificates they need quickly and securely, without waiting for assistance. This speeds up the whole process, improving operational efficiency without compromising security.

For security and operations teams, certificate management self-service means less time spent on routine tasks and more time to focus on high-value priorities. At the same time, they retain complete visibility and control over certificate and PKI operations.

With AVX ONE CLM, your organization gains a scalable, efficient, and secure way to manage certificates across diverse teams, all while maintaining productivity.

If you would like to know more about how automation and certificate self-service can transform the way your teams manage certificates, talk to one of our experts today!

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blogs Archive - AppViewX authored by Krupa Patil. Read the original post at: https://www.appviewx.com/blogs/certificate-management-self-service-capabilities-to-simplify-access-and-boost-efficiency/