By
It should be the goal of web administrators and all organizations with websites to have as much uptime as possible. Preferably 100% website uptime is best. When websites, web apps, and webpages go down, it hurts organizations. It hurts their image with customers and clientele who want to have access to their services whenever they need it. It hurts prospective customers and clientele who want to find out what your company is all about before they consider spending money.
The reputational damage from web downtime is difficult for an accountant to ledger, but it definitely affects a company’s bottom line. Transactions aren’t made, services aren’t delivered. If I’m in the mood to buy a new pair of boots and the website of one of my favorite shoe stores is down, I’ll just go to the website of another shoe store, their direct competitor. It’s as simple as that.
These days everyone should know that all web content should be delivered through HTTPS, not HTTP. Even if the data being transferred isn’t considered to be sensitive, it should still go through HTTPS. All major web browsers on both desktop and mobile will warn people that HTTP sites are “not secure.” Google has made it publicly known that HTTPS webpages rank higher in Google Search than HTTP webpages. So, all websites and web applications will need SSL/TLS certificates to be deployed at all times. And if there’s no proper certificate for a session, it can cause embarrassing web downtime.
More and more organizations are making sure that their web servers have DDoS attack protection. DDoS attacks are still a significant problem, so that’s a good thing. But web downtime caused by TLS certificate outages may get overlooked.
David Bisson recently wrote about the ongoing TLS certificate problem, and some of the tweets sent by disappointed web surfers and customers. Don’t be surprised if your customers make social media posts about your web downtime. The best thing to do is to acknowledge their report, check if the outage exists and where it is, and then fix it as soon as possible.
TLS certificates can be assigned to certain subdomains (such as shop.website.com, mail.website.com), and IP addresses can also have multiple certificates. Therefore, a certificate outage may only make a specific section or set of webpages of a website go down. That’s why web administrators may not notice certificate outages until it’s too late. It’s crucial to deploy certificate monitoring systems, because websites and web apps these days are very complex and partial web downtime can be subtle... but the consequences can be terrible to your business!
Andrew Ray is an excellent web developer with an impressive portfolio. A certificate outage on his own professional website was reported by a user on Twitter. As you can see, Ray responded in the correct way.
This example shows that TLS outages can happen even to experts who know what they’re doing. But Ray’s business is a one-man operation, right? Surely this happens a lot less frequently to large organizations with thousands of people? Well, you would be wrong. Dungeons and Dragons is one of the most popular offline games ever. I should know, I’m a human cleric with a few DnD 5th edition character sheets laying around the house. I’m of Chaotic Good alignment if you’re curious. Dungeons and Dragons intellectual property owner Wizards of the Coast is a large company which was acquired by Hasbro in 1999. Fans expect their website to have uptime, but a user tweeted about a TLS outage caused downtime.
Mastadon is a social network with a reported over two million users. It seems like they have frequent certificate outages on their site. This can’t be good if they want to compete with other social networks in order to grow their user base.
Salesforce is a huge online business. Even well-run companies with a strong online presence run the risk of outages in diverse lines of business.
Lots of people worldwide subscribe to Sirius XM satellite radio. It’s a huge media business. Their website needs to authenticate users, but it can’t when their certificates are invalid.
One of Adobe’s platforms had certificates that expired two months ago. This just goes to show that even leading, security-oriented companies continue to struggle with outages.
ESPN is a hugely popular sports media brand which is owned by Disney.
Public sector entities experience certificate outages too. Here’s what happened to a major Indian government agency.
Venafi recently conducted a survey of 550 chief information officers (CIOs) from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia. It was about their experiences with certificate outages. Here are some of the key findings:
Venafi vice president Kevin Bocek said, “Overall, CIOs need greater visibility, intelligence and automation of the entire life cycle of all certificates prevent outages.” And some of the symptoms of that need are seen by your customers, and also reported all over Twitter.
Find out how Venafi can help you prevent certificate related outages.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur elit.
Thank you for subscription
Scroll to the bottom to accept
VENAFI CLOUD SERVICE
*** IMPORTANT ***
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY BEFORE CONTINUING WITH REGISTRATION AND/OR ACTIVATION OF THE VENAFI CLOUD SERVICE (“SERVICE”).
This is a legal agreement between the end user (“You”) and Venafi, Inc. ("Venafi" or “our”). BY ACCEPTING THIS AGREEMENT, EITHER BY CLICKING A BOX INDICATING YOUR ACCEPTANCE AND/OR ACTIVATING AND USING THE VENAFI CLOUD SERVICE FOR WHICH YOU HAVE REGISTERED, YOU AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU ARE ENTERING INTO THIS AGREEMENT ON BEHALF OF A COMPANY OR OTHER LEGAL ENTITY, YOU REPRESENT THAT YOU HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO BIND SUCH ENTITY AND ITS AFFILIATES TO THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, IN WHICH CASE THE TERMS "YOU" OR "YOUR" SHALL REFER TO SUCH ENTITY AND ITS AFFILIATES. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE SUCH AUTHORITY, OR IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, YOU MUST NOT ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT AND MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE.
You shall not access the Service if You are Our competitor or if you are acting as a representative or agent of a competitor, except with Our prior written consent. In addition, You shall not access the Service for purposes of monitoring its availability, performance or functionality, or for any other benchmarking or competitive purposes, and you shall not perform security vulnerability assessments or penetration tests without the express written consent of Venafi.
This Agreement was last updated on April 12, 2017. It is effective between You and Venafi as of the date of Your accepting this Agreement.
The Venafi Cloud Service includes two separate services that are operated by Venafi as software as a service, each of which is separately licensed pursuant to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and each of which is considered a Service under this Agreement: the Venafi Cloud Risk Assessment Service or the Venafi Cloud for DevOps Service. Your right to use either Service is dependent on the Service for which You have registered with Venafi to use.
This License is effective until terminated as set forth herein or the License Term expires and is not otherwise renewed by the parties. Venafi may terminate this Agreement and/or the License at any time with or without written notice to You if You fail to comply with any term or condition of this Agreement or if Venafi ceases to make the Service available to end users. You may terminate this Agreement at any time on written notice to Venafi. Upon any termination or expiration of this Agreement or the License, You agree to cease all use of the Service if the License is not otherwise renewed or reinstated. Upon termination, Venafi may also enforce any rights provided by law. The provisions of this Agreement that protect the proprietary rights of Venafi will continue in force after termination.
This Agreement shall be governed by, and any arbitration hereunder shall apply, the laws of the State of Utah, excluding (a) its conflicts of laws principles; (b) the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods; (c) the 1974 Convention on the Limitation Period in the International Sale of Goods; and (d) the Protocol amending the 1974 Convention, done at Vienna April 11, 1980.
In the meantime, please explore more of our solutions
In the meantime, please explore more of our solutions
This site uses cookies to offer you a better experience. If you do not want us to use cookies, please update your browser settings accordingly. Find out more on how we use cookies.