Imagine you are working and having a great morning until your inbox is filled with emails. Your site is down, and your visitors are seeing the ‘‘Your connection is not private’’ warning. Such a situation arises when your SSL/TLS certificate expires.
Sounds stressful, right?
But it doesn’t have to be. Rather than manually renewing certificates and risking this occasional failure, why not automate the whole process?
By using the right tools or cloud-based solutions, you can automatically renew your SSL/TLS every time it expires and never have to worry about an expiration date again.
This guide will walk you through simple, hands-free ways to keep your site secure, troubleshoot common problems, and automate smooth renewals. No more last-minute panics—just a seamless, secure experience for you and your users.
With that said, let’s look at how to automate the SSL/TLS renewal process for better workflow.
1. Implement a Certificate Management System for CSRs
The simplest way to ensure that your SSL/TLS certificates are always secured is to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR).
A CSR is basically a request that includes a domain name, organization name, public key, and everything necessary to obtain a new SSL/TLS certificate from your authority. Without this certificate, your website would have no secure and encrypted connections.
That’s where SSL/TLS certificate management comes into play. You can use such certificate management solutions to generate CSRs and securely store them for later use.
This eliminates any extra steps in the process, ensuring the proper details are present and the request is put to the Certificate Authority at the correct time.
Further, by using this automated approach, you aren’t left vulnerable to human error, and your SSL/TLS certificates are always up to date, reducing the chances of a certificate expiration, leading to website downtime or security defects.
2. Submit CSRs to Certificate Authority
After you have created a Certificate Sign Request (CSR), you need to provide it to the trusted Certificate Authority (CA). It is essential to obtain this certificate to protect sensitive data, secure your website or application’s communications, and ensure that it remains a trusted source by users.
If you have a lot of domains and certificates, manually uploading CSRs to a CA can be tedious. Luckily, there are many CAs that provide automated APIs for this purpose, which further eliminates the need for constant manual intervention.
That said, for companies working with lots of certificates, Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) tools can be invaluable. With their help, the chances of delay or human error are minimized, and CSR submission can be automated.
Further, they help to keep expiration dates on the certificates tracked, and renewals of multi-CA certificates are managed to proceed on time.
3. Automating Validation Process
The Certificate Authority (CA) must verify that the request is legitimate before they can issue a new SSL/TLS certificate. By validating this process, the certificates are only issued to authorized users to prevent fraud and keep security risks to a minimum.
Also, the types of certificates determine the level of verification.
- Domain Validation (DV): The fastest and simplest domain validation type where the CA verifies ownership by modifying a DNS record, confirming an email, or uploading a file to the website.
- Extended Validation (EV) & Organization Validation (OV): These require additional verification, such as verifying the company’s physical location or even talking to an actual company representative.
As manual validation can slow down this verification process, many organizations utilize certificate automation tools that are designed to work as part of the CA workflow. Some providers will even provide auto-domain verification, which makes renewals a breeze.
4. Install Renewed Certificate on the Server
When the Certificate Authority (CA) issues a fresh SSL/TLS certificate, the subsequent very important step is to install it on the proper server instead of the old or expired certificate. That said, missing or delaying this step can result in security warnings, website downtime, or broken encrypted connections, which no business wants to face.
However, manually installing certificates across multiple servers is rather tedious and can take a lot of time when you have a large organization. For this reason, you should automate this process using a certificate management solution that handles deployment and distribution without any problems.
These tools will ensure that a new certificate is applied properly without constant manual supervision. You can work with cloud services or enterprise certificate automation platforms for scheduled deployment tasks to automatically deploy SSL/TLS certificates.
It not only avoids expired certificates but also helps businesses to be compliant with security policies.
5. Update the Certificates Automatically
Updating certificate dependencies across your infrastructure is another important step after the installation of the renewed certificate. One of the uses of SSL/TLS certificates is secure communication, which is used in many applications, load balancers, and API gateways.
If these services have not updated the new certificate and continue using the old one, they will fail to operate, and there will be a security breach. To prevent such a situation, you should automate the propagation of certificates across all dependent systems. You can use certificate management tools to ensure that all linked services are updated at once.
Conclusion
The problem with manually managing SSL/TLS certificates is that they’re too cumbersome and prone to errors. So, if this process is automated, it will lead to security complaints, no service downtime, and increased operational efficiency.
You can automate the process by using certificate management tools to generate CSRs, submit CSRs to CA, automate the validation process, install renewed certificates, and update them.
So, do not stick to manual work and upgrade to the mentioned methods to automate the process for a smooth and quick certificate renewal.
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