Establishing a Certificate Inventory System

The foundation of effective certificate management begins with comprehensive inventory tracking. Every certificate in your infrastructure needs documentation including its purpose, expiration date, responsible party, and technical details. This inventory prevents certificates from being forgotten and expiring unexpectedly—a surprisingly common issue even in large organizations. Start by auditing your current certificates across all servers, services, and platforms to establish your baseline inventory.

Create a centralized certificate database that captures essential information for each certificate. Track the domain names covered, certificate type (DV, OV, EV), issuing certificate authority, issue and expiration dates, key strength and algorithm, server locations, and contact information for responsible parties. Include business context such as which applications or services depend on each certificate and the business impact of expiration. This comprehensive tracking enables informed decision-making about renewals and upgrades.

Certificate discovery tools help identify certificates you might not know exist. Network scanning tools can identify HTTPS services across your infrastructure, revealing shadow IT installations or forgotten development servers. Cloud platform auditing features list certificates provisioned through their services. DNS analysis can reveal subdomains that might have independent certificates. Regular discovery scans ensure your inventory remains complete as infrastructure evolves.

Maintain your inventory actively rather than treating it as a one-time exercise. Establish processes for adding new certificates to the inventory immediately upon creation. Document certificate changes, replacements, and revocations. Regular audits comparing your inventory against actual deployments catch discrepancies before they cause problems. Consider certificate management platforms that automate discovery and inventory maintenance, especially for larger environments.