The phrase “too much of a good thing” has never been more relevant than in the context of SSL/TLS certificates. As enterprises scale, their reliance on digital identities to secure websites, APIs, cloud workloads, and IoT devices has led to a phenomenon known as certificate sprawl.
Certificate Sprawl has been a source of overwhelm for IT teams everywhere. For a large organization, managing just a handful of certificates is simple. However, managing tens of thousands across departments, multi-cloud environments, and hybrid infrastructures is a high-stakes game of “Whac-A-Mole” where a single miss can lead to catastrophic outages or security breaches.
Understanding the chaos: What is certificate sprawl?
Certificate sprawl occurs when the volume of SSL/TLS certificates grows beyond the IT department’s ability to track and manage them effectively. It is often fueled by:
- Shadow IT: Individual departments purchasing certificates without central IT oversight (frustrating, but common).
- Rapid deployment: containers and microservices that require short-lived certificates.
- Shorter lifespans: The industry shift toward 90-day certificate lifespans (driven by initiatives like Google’s “Moving Forward, Together”) has quadrupled the manual workload of renewal.
- Multi-cloud environments: Certificates issued by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud often reside in silos, invisible to a central security team.
The cost of unmanaged certificates.
When visibility is lost, the risks are anything but theoretical. Unmanaged certificates are proven operational and financial liabilities.
1. Costly downtime and outages
The most common consequence of certificate sprawl is the silent expiration. When a critical certificate expires unnoticed, services go down. For a global enterprise, an hour of downtime on a primary API or customer-facing portal can translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue and potentially irreversible brand damage.
2. Expanded attack surface
Unmanaged certificates are often associated with weak cryptographic standards or “rogue” certificates issued by unauthorized entities. If a security team doesn’t know a certificate exists, they cannot ensure it uses modern encryption or revoke it if a private key is compromised.
3. Compliance failures
Regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR require strict control over data encryption. Lack of a centralized certificate inventory makes it impossible to demonstrate compliance during an audit, which can lead to heavy fines.
Strategies to tame the sprawl.
Mitigating certificate sprawl requires moving away from manual spreadsheets and toward a proactive, automated framework.
Continuous discovery
You cannot manage what you cannot see. Enterprises must implement continuous network and internet scanning to identify every certificate associated with their domains and subdomains, including those issued by third parties or forgotten by legacy teams.
Centralized monitoring
Consolidate all discovered certificates into a “single pane of glass.” This dashboard should provide real-time status updates on expiration dates, certificate authority (CA) sources, and the strength of the encryption algorithms in use.
Automated alerts
Relying on a person to remember a renewal date in three months is a recipe for failure. Automated escalation paths ensure that the right stakeholders are notified weeks before an expiration occurs, with follow-up alerts if no action is taken.
The Solution: Red Sift Certificate Monitoring (managed by 101domain)
Managing thousands of certificates shouldn’t be a full-time manual task for your security team. 101domain has partnered with Red Sift to provide you Certificate Monitoring services designed specifically for large-scale enterprises that need to regain control of certificate sprawl.
The Red Sift platform eliminates the risks of certificate sprawl by offering:
- Real-time global discovery: We continuously scan your infrastructure and the public internet to find every SSL/TLS certificate linked to your brand, including those hidden in cloud environments like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Automated health analysis: Our system doesn’t just watch dates; it also analyzes certificate configurations to identify vulnerabilities, mis-issuances, or weak cryptographic standards before they can be exploited.
- Advanced notification logic: Customize your alert thresholds to fit your enterprise workflow, ensuring your IT and DevOps teams have ample time to renew without the “fire drill” of an imminent expiration.
- NIST compliance support: We help you meet stringent security guidelines and regulatory requirements by providing a comprehensive audit trail and a centralized inventory of your entire PKI environment.
- Easy integration: Works seamlessly with Cisco and Pax8, so setup and operations run smoothly.
Don’t let certificate sprawl be the thorn in the side of your IT team’s focus. Scale your security as fast as you scale your business with 101domain. Get started with Certificate Monitoring today.