One of the major challenges organizations face in certificate lifecycle management is the timely renewal of certificates. Application owners often fail to renew certificates promptly despite receiving multiple advance expiry alerts. This oversight leads to application outages, business downtime, and security risks.

The AppViewX AVX ONE Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution effectively addresses the issue of certificate renewals through its ability to seamlessly integrate with existing CI/CD, automation, and end-point management tools.

AppViewX AVX ONE CLM is an advanced certificate lifecycle management solution that automates all certificate processes end-to-end. It helps discover, inventory, monitor, automate, and control the complete certificate lifecycle, including issuance, renewal, and provisioning, for every certificate, all through a central console.

AppViewX AVX ONE CLM can leverage the integration with Puppet to facilitate the deployment of certificates across various platforms, including web servers, databases, and load balancers, ensuring timely updates and minimizing the risk of expired certificates.

AppViewX AVX ONE CLM Integrations Solve Certificate Management Challenges

Certificate expirations, renewals and revocations can be complex tasks for admins who manage certificates. Here is where AppViewX AVX ONE CLM can help with certificate lifecycle management challenges. AppViewX AVX ONE CLM automates certificate discovery across hybrid multi-cloud environments and builds a comprehensive certificate inventory giving you visibility and complete control to efficiently manage certificate expirations, renewals and revocation to eliminate outages and prevent security weaknesses.

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.

Maintaining certificates is one of the most important aspects of this task, and failure to do so can create a range of technical, security and business risks. One of the biggest challenges is dealing with certificate expirations and renewal to ensure the new certificate is pushed to the correct profile. If not executed properly, this can leave open issues and provide backdoor entry points, which significantly increases the complexity of the certificate configuration.

AppViewX understands the importance of maintaining a clean and efficient certificate lifecycle management process. With AppViewX AVX ONE CLM, you can reduce the technical, security and business risks associated with certificate lifecycle management, streamline the auditing process, and ensure that your processes operate at peak efficiency.

Some Housekeeping

The server repository, which includes details of web servers, is meticulously maintained. Filters are employed to specifically extract details of these web servers from the AppViewX AVX ONE CLM solution, and these details are then cataloged in the corresponding database tables. The comprehensive list of automated web servers must be displayed on the unified portal. Both certificate and server details are updated through the collaborative efforts of the PKI team. Furthermore, the PKI team is responsible for incorporating these server details into the AppViewX AVX ONE CLM collection repository to facilitate subsequent processing steps.

Flow chart

Puppet Tagging Web Server

For the web portal to function correctly, it must execute an API call to the AppViewX AVX ONE CLM solution. This call retrieves essential information such as the serial number, expiry date, and other details needed to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). This data is then automatically updated on the web portal. Before this, as a prerequisite, the relevant application team must associate the certificate with its corresponding server in AppViewX AVX ONE CLM via the cert portal. To tag certificates for renewal, an API is activated, which subsequently updates the AppViewX AVX ONE CLM collection, ensuring that the certificate is properly tagged for renewal.

Under the Hood

• The Web team maintains a server inventory, which is used to extract server details. They need to isolate web server details from the CLM and record them in the designated table.
• An API call to the AppViewX AVX ONE CLM is made to retrieve CSR parameters, which are then automatically updated on the web portal. The application team is responsible for linking the certificate with the server in AppViewX AVX ONE CLM using the cert portal.
• Certificate details are to be gathered from each server, and then cross-referenced with the information on the web portal and the target server.
• The web unified portal will execute an API call to the AppViewX AVX ONE CLM to generate a CSR via Puppet, and the resulting CSR data will be returned to AVX ONE CLM.
• Following the CSR output, a certificate is created and details such as the new serial number and common name are updated in the inventory.
• Once the certificate is generated, emails regarding the change in the deployment plan are sent to CMDB owners and server owners.
• The scheduling of the certificate push is arranged.
• The web operations team will submit a standard change request to deploy the certificate based on the desired date.
• The AppViewX AVX ONE CLM unified portal will orchestrate the certificate deployment through Puppet as per the schedule, and the web unified portal will trigger the AppViewX AVX ONE CLM API for certificate deployment.
• Any changes in the deployment process will be communicated to the PKI team.
• Post-deployment, a communication is sent out from the web unified portal to the PKI team, Web team/User, detailing the outcome of the deployment (whether it was successful or a failure)

Simplifying Certificate Lifecycle Management with AppViewX AVX ONE CLM

The integrated and automated process enabled by AppViewX AVX ONE CLM ensures efficient and secure management of certificate deployment. From the initial communication by the AppViewX team to the final deployment and communication of the outcome, each step is meticulously designed for precision and effectiveness. The use of AppViewX AVX ONE CLM APIs, coupled with the web unified portal’s capabilities, facilitates seamless synchronization between different teams and systems. The tagging of certificates, the generation and comparison of details, and the scheduling of certificate pushes are all handled with automation, reducing manual effort and the potential for errors.

This approach enhances the security and reliability of certificate lifecycle management while ensuring a cohesive and well-coordinated effort across various teams, culminating in a well-executed deployment plan that is effectively communicated to all relevant stakeholders.

To learn more about AppViewX AVX ONE CLM and integration with Puppet, please schedule a demo today.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blogs Archive - AppViewX authored by AppViewX. Read the original post at: https://www.appviewx.com/blogs/tls-certificates-renewal-with-appviewx-avx-one-clm-and-puppet/