13 September 2024 InCommon Self-Service, Security, and Strategy: InCommon Certificate Service Webinar Speakers Offer Their Experience and Expertise Subscribe for more like this Share Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Edited by Apryl Motley, CAE – Communications & Technical Writing Consultant Interested in knowing how your colleagues manage and update hundreds or thousands of certificates on a regular basis, including connecting Certificate Manager (SCM) to servers and services to automate certificate renewal? And using ACME to build a hub-and-spoke framework for scaling certificate management? To address these topics and more, the InCommon Certificate Service is hosting a webinar, “Certificate Discovery, Management, and Renewal,” at 12 p.m. ET on Tuesday, September 17, 2024. Register for the webinar Clay Cooper, IAM platform engineer IV at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Brian Epstein, IT manager, network and security, CISO at the Institute for Advanced Study, will be the featured speakers. Both at their respective institutions for almost two decades, Cooper and Epstein bring a wealth of experience and expertise to certificate management. Here’s their take on the state of certificate management in research and education and what their peers will gain from their presentations during the webinar. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities you encounter in managing certificates at your institution? Cooper: Our biggest challenge is providing self-service functionality while preserving security controls. By adding a standards-based service, we plan to lower the cost of managing certificates for everyone, which is even more critical with the expectation that certificate lifetimes will soon be shortened.Epstein: Many vendors implement certificates differently, so having to juggle all the different formats and chain order makes installing certificates difficult for our admins. How has the InCommon Certificate Service been beneficial or helpful to you? Cooper: The InCommon Certificate Service helps me efficiently issue certs without worrying about a firewall in the way of ACME, navigating university purchasing approvals and fulfillment processes, or being the bottleneck between university departments and their ability to order certs.Epstein: It allows us the ability to create certificates for all our needs from a commercial CA for a low price. It also gives us access to other professionals within the higher ed space to collaborate and share. Why are the topics (Certificate Discovery, Management, and Renewal) being covered during the webinar important ones to address? Epstein: With the advent of Post Quantum Cryptography, and 90 day certs, knowing your exposure and how to manage it is key. All of these topics are critical to being successful with your encryption environment.Cooper: I’ll cover how to enable anyone within our community to order servers automatically without adding extra burden to our certificate service team while preserving security controls. By removing the barriers of waiting and manual approval, server and application admins can be more productive and add more value to the university. What do you hope webinar attendees will learn/gain from your presentation? Epstein: Strategies for future proofing their environments.Cooper: We all have challenges with managing certificates. Some of those challenges overlap, and some are unique to your institution. I hope that by seeing how others have solved problems, attendees can take pieces and parts to solve their unique challenges. When we share ideas and solutions, we all benefit. Join Us for the Webinar We hope you’ll join us online for “Certificate Discovery, Management, and Renewal,” at 12 p.m. ET on Tuesday, September 17, 2024. Register for the webinar About the InCommon Certificate Service The InCommon Certificate Service offers unlimited certificates for all the domains you own or control for U.S. higher education. The service is ideal for an enterprise-level deployment and offers both central control and delegated administration of ordering and managing certificates. More details available on the InCommon Certificate Service web page.