Sectigo’s Turning on the Certificate Management Lights
Buying and renewing digital certificates is about to get more complicated and important. That spells opportunity for MSPs, according to Sectigo.
CrowdStrike, per coverage elsewhere, is clearly excited about SIEM replacement. Getting service providers similarly excited will probably take some work, but not as much work as Sectigo has ahead of it regarding a rapidly emerging revenue opportunity more or less hiding in plain sight: TLS certificate management. Every MSP knows what certificates are, observes Mark Bloom, senior director of North America channel sales at Sectigo. Far fewer buy and renew them on behalf of their clients, or even understand why they should.
“If there’s no why behind doing something, there’s never going to be an initiative that pushes it forward,” Bloom says. “We have to do a better job of educating the community on the why factor.”
And there is in fact a compelling why factor, arguably several of them. First and foremost, the traditional 398-day lifespan of a digital certificate is likely to shrink soon, to 90 days if a pending proposal by Google is approved and just 47 days if Apple gets its way. That could drop to one day a few years from now too, Bloom (pictured) predicts, when quantum computing makes encryption algorithms dangerously vulnerable.
Which means we’re likely headed toward a future in which expired certificates become more common, which also means things like satellite networks going down unexpectedly become more common too. Renewing certificates, however, takes three to eight hours each on average, according to Bloom.
“It’s a lot of work, especially if you’re having to do renewals six to eight times a year,” he says.
Small businesses can’t take that on, and larger ones don’t want to. “It takes them away from doing and implementing projects that they could be working on,” Bloom says.
Hence the opportunity Sectigo, which both issues certificates and sells solutions for managing them, is evangelizing. “Having MSPs take over that management piece of it for their customers adds a new line of business for them that’s probably not in their repertoire today,” Bloom says.
It’s a sticky line of business too, he adds, both because transferring certificate management from one MSP to another is complicated and because the service adds potentially differentiating value to otherwise commoditized contracts.
These days though, according to Bloom, most MSPs don’t even know how many certificates a given client has until Sectigo tells them. “There’s a lot of times we get on the phone with partners and say, ‘they bought 30 in the last five days. Did you even know about it?’” he notes. The honest response to that question—no—gets people wondering how many other customers have certificates they’re not aware of.
“I equate it to turning on the light switch,” Bloom says. “The room’s dark and when you bring this problem to them the light goes on and then they start seeing it everywhere.”
Deal registrations rose close to 100% as a result last year, he adds. Most MSPs are still living in darkness just the same.