Azure Key Vault service offers a secure storage solution for cryptographic keys, API keys, passwords, and certificates in the cloud. However, managing this vault typically involves manual updates and additions by cloud administrators. Given the large volume of certificates and keys and the frequent updates they require, manual updates can become quite tedious and time-consuming.

Managing Assets in Azure Key Vault:

For organizations of all types and sizes, certificate management is critical for ensuring trust, enabling encryption, and providing secure access to connected devices, applications and services. Failure to manage certificates effectively can create a range of security, operational and business risks.

Organizations managing a large number of certificates and keys in Azure Key Vault face challenges in ensuring efficient and secure lifecycle management. The absence of a certificate lifecycle management (CLM) solution can lead to issues, such as expired certificates, outdated keys, and manual overhead in the update process. These issues, in turn, hamper operational efficiency, increase the risk of security breaches, and impede compliance with industry standards.

A robust certificate and key management solution, like the AppViewX AVX ONE Platform, is needed to seamlessly integrate with Azure Key Vault, automate certificate renewals, facilitate key rotation, enforce security policies, and provide a user-friendly interface for efficient monitoring and management.

AppViewX AVX ONE Certificate Lifecycle Management Solution

One of the biggest challenges in certificate lifecycle management is dealing with certificate expirations and renewal. When a certificate is about to expire, it must be renewed by obtaining a new certificate from the respective Certificate Authority (CA) and pushing it to the correct profile. If the renewal process is not executed properly, it can lead to outages causing business downtime and providing backdoor entry points for attackers, significantly increasing the risk of data breaches.

The AppViewX AVX ONE Platform is a ready-to-consume, scalable certificate lifecycle management (CLM) solution that automates all certificate processes end-to-end. You can discover, inventory, monitor, and automate the complete certificate lifecycle for every certificate, all through a central console. It brings together visibility, automation, and control across on-premises, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, IoT, and containerized environments to help you manage your certificates efficiently and stay on top of cyber threats.

AVX ONE CLM streamlines all certificate processes, allowing you to collate all necessary information and direct multiple systems to execute an arbitrary set of tasks with ease. With AVX ONE CLM, you can reduce the operational, security and business risks associated with certificate lifecycle management, streamline the auditing process, and ensure that your processes operate at peak efficiency.

The advantage of integrating with AppViewX is that it not only automates certificate and key management on local servers and devices, but also extends its capabilities to cloud services, including Azure Cloud and Azure Key Vault.

Under the Hood: Integration with Azure Key Vault

Let’s briefly explore how AppViewX can help with effortlessly managing and updating all your certificates and keys in the Azure Key Vault.

The Azure Cloud Service can be onboarded on AppViewX by keying the required credentials securely stored on a triple-encrypted vault.

After the initial setup, the user is presented with two simple options. They can effortlessly transfer the certificate and key from the AppViewX’s Certificate Inventory directly to the Azure Key Vault with just a single click.

Alternatively, users have the option to perform bulk or multiple certificate transfers using the AVX ONE Automation Workflows. This method can be further automated, requiring user intervention only for approval or rejection decisions, which AppViewX conveniently facilitates through email notifications. Additionally, the status of these operations is regularly updated.

On the Azure side, it’s important to acknowledge that AppViewX is configured to update the Key Vault Service. This setup is straightforward, involving the establishment of correct access policies and application settings. These provide the necessary permissions along with the ‘Client Secret’ details. AppViewX utilizes these details (via APIs) to efficiently communicate with the Azure Key Vault Service.

Getting Started

The AppViewX AVX ONE CLM solution supports Azure Key Vault to significantly simplify and streamline the management of certificates and keys. By offering both single-click and bulk transfer options, along with the capacity for automated workflows that require minimal user intervention, AppViewX fully automates this otherwise tedious task of certificate and key management. Overall, this robust system minimizes manual effort and maximizes administrative discretion, making it an invaluable tool for administrators in managing cloud-based certificates and key repositories.

To learn more about the AVX ONE Certificate Lifecycle Management solution, request a demo today.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blogs Archive - AppViewX authored by George Samual Paul. Read the original post at: https://www.appviewx.com/blogs/simplifying-azure-key-vault-updates-with-appviewx-automation/