Entrust solves SSL compliance challenges

Finding, managing and analyzing SSL and other digital certificates can be time-consuming, complex and expensive. To help automate and simplify these tasks, Entrust introduces features for the Entrust Discovery service that is designed to help solve three of the industry’s top SSL challenges: avoiding application outages, ensuring compliance and managing multi-source certificate environments.

“Enterprise technical environments are too complex to believe that buying a few SSL certificates is sufficient to satisfy both internal and external security and compliance responsibilities,” said Entrust President and CEO Bill Conner. “From discovery, management and validation, to analysis and reporting, digital certificate management is required on an ongoing basis. This is particularly true for large organizations that may have different types of digital certificates from many different vendors.”

Simplifying these responsibilities, Entrust introduces key service upgrades to directly address the most difficult SSL and digital certificate pitfalls experienced by enterprises, organizations and businesses in various industries and verticals.

Automatic certificate chain validation alerts

Entrust Discovery includes automatic certificate chain validation email alerts to quickly identify the status of an organization’s applications, sites or server to help confirm they are secure.

While a publically trusted certificate may be installed correctly, intermediate SSL certificates installed improperly will make websites appear unsecure to end-users. This critical feature can help organizations and businesses avoid lost sales, address compliance issues and reduce administrator workloads.

Custom charts, filtering and rules

By providing certificate administrators with relevant information, organizations can better monitor their online environments to verify they are in compliance — a key capability to help avoid breach. Entrust Discovery’s custom charts, filtering and rules provide graphic-based reports to help organizations gain a comprehensive perspective on their certificate environment.

“Developed as a direct result from valued customer feedback, the certificate discovery service now provides some of the most graphical, in-depth certificate reporting and analysis on the market — and it can all be automated and provided directly to a user’s easy-to-understand homepage,” said Conner.

Each organization has unique policies, security standards and compliance requirements. Entrust Discovery now includes report customization, advanced filtering and automatic rules policy that help streamline the day-to-day management of certificate pools.

New advanced rules — established within notice, issuer and certificate rules categories — assist organizations in automating certificate tasks based on established policy or guidelines. This can range from automating bulk actions, assigning management of certificates based on issuer, or deciding management status based on specific information (e.g., organization, location, custom fields) within the certificate.

Organizations may tailor data to create custom, easy-to-read charts for better analysis that can help uncover problems in an environment, simplify decision-making and gain a better understanding of current and future certificate needs.

Complementing that ability, custom data charts add extensive reporting capabilities within the Entrust Discovery dashboard. Certificate administrators may use easy, click-and-drag features to re-order charts, leverage high-resolution capabilities for better viewing or printing, customize dashboard chart views or create unlimited new charts from saved data filters. New detailed filtering options include subject name, public/non-public attributes, serial numbers, CAPI Store components and more.

Entrust Discovery’s comprehensive customization streamlines analysis and enables easier access to critical certificate data. It’s an advanced tool that empowers organizations with unlimited versatility and customization for monitoring a certificate population.

Organization customization

For many organizations, a certificate environment is managed by multiple teams or business units. Entrust Discovery now simplifies management of certificates in multi-organization environments — even from a mix of public, private or Microsoft CAs.

The service’s advanced organization capabilities enable administrators to split data into “organizations” to allow them to delegate control of different certificates pools. This flexibility eases the burden on top-level certificate administrators without losing the ability to control or monitor a complete environment.

Certificate discovery

Available as a managed service (cloud model) or a customer-deployed solution, Entrust Discovery simplifies the certificate discovery and inventory process. This can help save the management effort of manually inventorying machines and networks, as well as tracking certificate expiry dates in complicated spreadsheets or tables.

Within an organization’s environment, Entrust Discovery is capable of quickly finding and inventorying certificates. Three separate components — Entrust Discovery Agent, Entrust Discovery CAPI Scanner and Entrust Discovery Manager — collaborate to help organizations discover the risks caused by rogue or expiring certificates, and then subsequently assists in resolving these issues.

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