Symantec today announced Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center, a cloud-based service for enterprises with large numbers of certificates used for business authentication and data encryption on servers.
The solution, powered by VeriSign, discovers, centralizes, and provides reports to help enable organizations to proactively manage certificates from any Certificate Authority (CA). For the first time, enterprises have total visibility and control over their certificates, enabling them to reduce risk, costs and operational inefficiencies.
Managing Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates is critically important for enterprises and is becoming a larger challenge, especially due to the skyrocketing number of mobile and cloud-based applications and devices worldwide which are driving growing infrastructure needs.
Getting comprehensive information on all SSL certificates, regardless of CA, across complex enterprise networks has challenging for many organizations. SSL Certificates deployed on both internal and external customer-facing applications pose a management challenge and an expiration risk, so in both cases certificate expiration surprises or installation misconfiguration can cause substantial embarrassment, service disruptions, increased support costs and lost revenue.
Now in Beta, Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center looks to answer many enterprises’ calls for an easily achievable central certificate data repository and an affordable, automated scanning service that provides timely and efficient discovery of certificate data across diverse networks. Highly optimized discovery capabilities, advanced notification and scheduling features and rich reporting functionality on the intelligence collected from the network encourage both proactive certificate management and peace of mind for enterprises.
Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center automatically evaluates certificates nearing expiration and triggers alerts based on an administrator’s configurations. By reducing the risk of unknown or unwanted certificates on enterprise networks, Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center minimizes costly surprise certificate expirations or high-risk rogue certificates, and thus helps ensure business continuity. Moving forward, Symantec says that ths solution is will provide policy compliance checking to ensure enterprise certificates discovered meet internal or regulatory policies.
Centralization and automation are an improvement over current scattered and manual SSL accounting processes in spreadsheets, which historically have been error-prone, did not effectively track all certificates, and presented an additional time-consuming burden on already swamped IT staff. Data visibility frees IT staff to perform other core duties and actually save time through proactive management. Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center also aims to add relevant capabilities to its feature set around automating SSL renewal and installation on a number of enterprise applications to further reduce management overhead and allow IT administrators to focus on more important tasks.
“Over the last year, this service was developed in consultation with more than 25 Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies with the key goal to create a simple and usable solution to centralize certificate data and automate core lifecycle processes,” said Fran Rosch, Vice President, Trust Services, Symantec.
