Cryptography and digital certificates form the security backbone of modern digital enterprises. As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies to leverage the best services from different cloud providers, they face significant challenges in managing digital certificates. Mismanaged certificates can lead to outages, security breaches, and compliance violations—issues that no organization can afford. This blog provides a comprehensive guide to effectively managing certificates in multi-cloud environments, highlighting the challenges and exploring how solutions like AppViewX AVX ONE Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) can help.

The Growing Importance of Certificate Lifecycle Management

Digital transformation, cloud migration, remote work, and the Internet of Things (IoT) create growth opportunities and new revenue streams for organizations. However, they also bring security challenges. As data and resources move online, the attack surface widens, and threat vectors increase. Keeping data and resources safe in distributed, perimeterless environments depends on how secure your machine-to-machine communications are. Digital certificates play a crucial role in authenticating machines (devices, workloads, applications, cloud services, APIs, etc.), enabling trust,encrypting communications, and ensuring secure data transmission.

Given the number of physical and virtual machines connected to the internet today, trust, authentication and encryption are essential for securing communications and preventing data breaches. Digital certificates bring trust, authentication and encryption together, making them work seamlessly. As such, certificates form an important part of the overall cybersecurity strategy and must be well-managed and well-protected.

Key Challenges in Multi-Cloud Certificate Management

Centralized Visibility and Control

With certificates spread across various cloud platforms, regions, and on-premises systems, maintaining a clear and centralized view of all certificates is a daunting task. This fragmentation makes it difficult to track the status of certificates, leading to potential security gaps and compliance issues. Large organizations running their infrastructure on platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) typically have hundreds to thousands of accounts, services, and resources. Monitoring and managing a massive volume of digital certificates across these multiple service providers and accounts present significant challenges for the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) team. Manual processes can lead to poor visibility, scattered management, errors, misconfigurations, and weak policy enforcement.

Limited Automation for Certificate Lifecycle Management

Many cloud-native tools, such as AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), Azure Key Vault, and Google Certificate Manager, offer certificate lifecycle management solutions with limitations, often restricted to specific services even within their own ecosystems. These CLM offerings lag in providing centralized visibility across all cloud services, all certificate authorities (CAs), different regions and accounts, and only support a limited range of services.

Integration with External CAs and Non-Cloud Applications

Enterprises often use a combination of public and private CAs to meet various security needs. Managing certificates from these multiple sources, especially when deploying them on non-cloud infrastructure or third-party applications, requires significant manual effort if there are no automation strategies in place. This complexity can lead to inconsistencies and potential security vulnerabilities. Cloud-native solutions do not always offer seamless integration with external CAs or diverse applications, further complicating the process.

Compliance, Data Sovereignty, and Security Standards

Organizations must comply with industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOX, NIST and other regulatory and security standards, which mandate strict controls over data security, privacy, and encryption. Ensuring that all certificates across different cloud providers meet these compliance requirements is challenging, especially when dealing with data sovereignty issues across different geographic regions. Specifically, adhering to NIST guidelines for certificate management involves enforcing strong encryption standards, regular audits, and stringent access controls, which require a centralized management solution capable of applying these standards uniformly across all environments.

How AppViewX AVX ONE CLM Overcomes These Challenges

AppViewX AVX ONE CLM offers a comprehensive, automated certificate lifecycle management solution that addresses the complexities of managing certificates in hybrid multi-cloud environments. Here’s how AppViewX AVX ONE CLM tackles the key challenges:

Centralized Visibility with Smart Discovery

AppViewX AVX ONE CLM provides a unified dashboard that offers complete visibility into all certificates across an organization’s entire network, including cloud and on-premises environments. Its smart discovery capabilities automatically scan various services from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises systems to find and inventory both public and private trust certificates. For example, in AWS, AVX ONE CLM connects with the master account to discover all associated child accounts, then identifies services and certificates within those accounts. This centralized approach ensures that organizations have a holistic view of their certificate landscape, reducing the risk of overlooked or expired certificates.

Comprehensive Automation for Certificate Lifecycle Management

By integrating seamlessly with major CAs and supporting both cloud-native and external applications, AppViewX AVX ONE CLM automates the entire certificate lifecycle—from issuance and renewal to deployment and revocation. This automation reduces manual intervention, minimizes errors, and ensures that certificates are consistently updated, maintaining a secure and compliant environment. With AppViewX AVX ONE CLM, enterprises can manage certificates across different cloud services (including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) and hybrid setups from a single CLM management interface.

Integration with External CAs and Diverse Applications

AppViewX AVX ONE CLM integrates with a broad range of public and private CAs, enabling organizations to manage all their certificates through a single CLM solution. This integration simplifies the process of enrolling and renewing certificates from different CAs, even for non-cloud environments. AppViewX AVX ONE CLM also integrates with application delivery infrastructure, such as load balancers, firewalls, and web servers, automating certificate deployment across various platforms.

Ensuring Compliance with Security Standards and Regulatory Mandates

With AppViewX AVX ONE CLM, organizations can enforce consistent PKI and crypto policies and compliance requirements across all environments. The solution supports policy-based management, enabling administrators to define and enforce policies related to certificate usage, encryption standards, and access controls. This capability helps enterprises meet industry-specific regulations such as NIST guidelines, GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, PCI-DSS, and others. By automating policy enforcement and providing detailed compliance reporting, AppViewX AVX ONE CLM ensures that all certificates adhere to enterprise PKI and crypto policies as well as security and regulatory standards, addressing gaps that cloud-native tools may not cover.

Case Study: Enhancing Certificate Lifecycle Management for a Global Enterprise

A global financial services company faced significant challenges in managing their certificates across a multi-cloud environment. With operations in multiple regions and compliance requirements such as NIST, GDPR, and PCI-DSS, they needed a solution that could provide centralized visibility, automate lifecycle management, and ensure compliance. By implementing AppViewX AVX ONE CLM, the company gained a centralized view of all certificates, automated renewal processes, and ensured consistent policy enforcement. As a result, they reduced operational overhead, improved compliance, and minimized the risk of certificate-related incidents.

Effective certificate lifecycle management is critical in hybrid multi-cloud environments, where the risks of mismanagement can lead to security breaches, non-compliance, and costly downtime. By addressing challenges such as visibility, automation, integration, compliance, and scalability, AppViewX AVX ONE CLM provides a robust solution for managing certificates across diverse cloud and on-premises environments. As you assess your certificate management strategy, consider leveraging the capabilities of AppViewX AVX ONE CLM to streamline operations, enhance security, and ensure compliance.

Evaluate your current certificate lifecycle management practices and explore how AppViewX AVX ONE CLM can help you navigate the complexities of hybrid multi-cloud environments. Contact us today for a demo and see how our solutions can enhance your security posture and simplify certificate lifecycle management.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blogs Archive - AppViewX authored by Karthikeyan Mani. Read the original post at: https://www.appviewx.com/blogs/navigating-certificate-lifecycle-management-in-multi-cloud-environments/