Certificate management tools manage the lifecycle of digital security certificates, including issuance, renewal, and revocation. This involves orchestrating certificate authorities (CAs) that often have hierarchical relationships with each other.
Certificates is a technical topic that’s broadly known but scarcely well-understood by the average developer. Most developers are specifically familiar with SSL certificates that websites use to facilitate safe communication; this same mechanism is generically used to secure communication between applications, services, and devices at an enterprise, including internal endpoints. However, enterprises have thousands of endpoints, and managing so many certificates requires a more bespoke set-up. For these companies, a dedicated certificate management tool is necessary.
To best understand certificate management systems, we’ll first walk through some rudimentary topics: how certificates work, the purpose of certificate authorities, and why enterprises rely on private certificate authorities. Certificate management tools have varying levels of support, so understanding these discrete parts is necessary to fully understand the differences between these products.
What is a digital certificate?
A digital certificate is a data record—usually following the X.509 standard by the ITU—that binds a subject’s identity (e.g., a domain, person, or organization) to a public key. Certificates are issued by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) that might be a public or private entity. Certificates aren’t permanent or open-ended. Instead, they expire after a pre-defined validity period and have usage constraints.
The principal purpose of a certificate is for the subject to establish trust with another entity; before transacting data, that external entity verifies the subject’s public key with a certificate authority. In most cases, both entities have certificates that they use to cross-verify each other (e.g., an mTLS connection). A good analogy is IDs: certificates are akin to a driver’s license; the certificate authority, meanwhile, is akin to the DMV that can be trusted to verify if the license is legitimate.
How do digital certificates work (under the hood)?
Digital certificates are cryptographic attestations that bind a public key to an identity (a domain, service, or user), a technique known as public key infrastructure (PKI). PKI uses public/private key pairs: the private key is kept secret by the owner, while the public key is distributed widely.
What is a certificate authority?
Certificate authorities (CAs) validate ownership and issue certificates. There are two types of CAs: (i) a root CA anchors trust, while (ii) intermediate CAs delegate issuance at scale without exposing the root. This creates a chain of trust—a client verifies a certificate with an intermediate CA that passes up the verification to the root CA.
Why do organizations set up Private Certificate Authorities
The most commonly known certificate authorities are public. For instance, SSL entrusts public certificate authorities so that websites can establish trust over the Internet. However, enterprises involve many private connections between entities inside a private network. For these entities, using a private certificate authority has some critical advantages.
First, private certificate authorities can issue certificates for anything. This includes entities that don’t have public identities, like Kubernetes services, IoT devices, or even printers.
Second, private certificate authorities can be fully customized. This means that key sizes and algorithms could be tailored to an organization’s security preferences, validity periods could match needs (including extremely short-lived credentials), and CAs could be governed by approval workflows that meet an organization’s compliance guidelines. Certificates can be programmed to be rotated, minimizing the odds of a breach due to a leaked private key.
Finally, private certificate authorities could be arranged in whatever way makes sense for an organization. For example, an organization could keep a root CA offline from the main VPC, only allowing for access by intermediary CAs that are isolated to individual geographies or environments. That way, if an intermediary CA shuts down, the blast radius is minimized because fewer services depend on it.
However, this distributed infrastructure becomes tedious to manage without tooling. While intermediary, isolated CAs help minimize the risk of a massive, platform-wide outage, they also create multiple discrete entities that need to be monitored. This challenge is addressed by certificate management tools.
The Real-World Cost of Poor Certificate Management
Let’s provide some texture to the specific tenets that make certificate management tedious.
Manual Management and Human Error
The most rudimentary way of tracking certificates is to use some form of a spreadsheet or consolidated record. However, if these records are manually being updated, they can go out of date and incorrectly inform other humans about the organization’s present security posture.
Certificate Expiration and Outages
Expired certificates are the leading cause of avoidable outages. A single expired TLS cert on a web server can break user logins, API calls, or payment flows, instantly impacting revenue and customer trust. In distributed systems, one stale mTLS credential can cascade into a partial outage that is difficult to diagnose.
However, because expiration is deterministic, these incidents are easily preventable with certificate management tools.
Compliance and Audit Failures
Regulations and frameworks increasingly require demonstrable control over cryptographic materials. For example, PCI DSS v4 requires organizations to have a managed inventory of trusted certs. ISO 27001 requires a robust framework for issuing public key certs. Even the Department of Defense’s CMMC standard has rules regarding certificates.
When certificate management is scattered, maintaining compliance becomes costly and error-prone. Auditors expect certificate management to be organized and visible.
What Does a Certificate Manager Do?
A common point of confusion is whether certificate management tools maintain certificate authorities (CAs). This is partially because certificate management tools are a vaguer term than an explicit product category. Some popular certificate management tooling are focused on inventory management of certificates. Other products, like Infisical, are designed to be end-to-end: setting up a certificate authority hierarchy, integrating with external certificate authorities, and managing certificates throughout their lifecycle.
Broadly speaking, certificate management tools provide varying levels of structure to certificate management, but generally help organizations avoid expired certificates in production by keeping a close eye on certificates across a system.
What Makes for a Good Certificate Management Tool?
Certain features make some certificate managers more encompassing for security teams than others.
Centralized Visibility and Control
Any certificate management tool needs to provide visibility into what certificates exist, where they are used, who owns them, and (most importantly) when they expire. Ideally, this data is searchable and can be leveraged to perform health checks.
Automated Certificate Issuance and Renewal
Good certificate management tools expand beyond inventory management and can validate that new certificates are alive before old ones are retired. That way, when certificates are rotated, there is no downtime.
Integration with Multiple CAs and Systems
Enterprises rarely have one CA or one environment. Good certificate management tools support multiple CAs—public and private—and can handle root and intermediate CAs with clear trust policies.
CA Management
The most bespoke certificate management tools, like Infisical, can provision entire certificate authority hierarchies, including root and intermediary CAs that follow X.509. This is an end-to-end approach where certificates are tracked and certificate authorities are provisioned from the same platform.
Ephemeral Certificates
Robust certificate management platforms like Infisical can issue ephemeral certificates, like short-lived SSH certificates, to provide just-in-time (JIT) access. These ephemeral credentials allow a user to access a surface for exactly as long as they need it; the credentials expire quickly, preventing an attacker from exploiting them at a later time.
Infisical: More Than a Certificate Management Solution
End-to-End Secrets and Certificate Lifecycle Management
Infisical unifies certificate management and secrets management into one lifecycle management platform. Teams can issue, renew, rotate, and revoke certificates— alongside API keys, tokens, and application secrets—all with robust access controls and audit trails.
Whether you’re fully on-premise, in one cloud, or spread across multi-cloud environments, Infisical provides policy-driven automation and a consistent control plane. By treating certificates and secrets as first-class objects, Infisical unifies security operations.
Built for DevOps, Cloud, and CI/CD Teams
Infisical is easily deployable to internal servers and cloud infrastructure. Engineers get straightforward tools to automate certificate and secret management; platform teams get policy, visibility, and guardrails; security gets auditable controls. The result is a management solution that accelerates delivery instead of slowing it down.
Comparing Infisical to Other Certificate Managers
Infisical vs. Sectigo Certificate Manager
Sectigo offers a capable certificate management solution, but it is siloed to just certificate issuance and lifecycle. Infisical pairs comparable certificate management with integrated secrets management and policy automation. Infisical also allows users to set up internal CAs without relying on a public CA like Sectigo. For teams seeking a unified platform rather than another silo, Infisical consolidates controls while preserving the flexibility to use the CAs you prefer.
Infisical vs. DigiCert Certificate Manager
DigiCert is similar to Sectigo, but is more focused on the enterprise market. Accordingly, the same comparison holds: DigiCert provides a public CA and a certificate management platform, but lacks the capacity to provision private CAs and set up an internal hierarchy. Those latter features are exclusive to products like Infisical.
Open Source Transparency vs. Legacy Vendors
Infisical’s open-source foundation provides transparency and community-driven velocity that legacy vendors struggle to match.
A Closing Thought: Certificate Management will remain critical in the age of AI
In today’s era of AI, many developer applications are being re-evaluated if they’ll survive the emergence of LLM-powered tooling. After all, a lot of workflows are being passively automated, no longer requiring a management system.
However, this isn’t the case for critical security products like certificate management software. While certificate management software does have room to grow by leveraging AI for flagging anomalies, it will remain a critical component of enterprise infrastructure. Certificates are the primary way for endpoints to safely interact, and platforms like Infisical are essential to organizations that need to meet commercial and regulatory requirements to scale.
