Home > Servers > Systems Management > White Papers > Eliminate the need to schedule, track, and maintain SSL certificate renewals with new feature in iDRAC9 v4.0 > Introduction
To ensure your company’s systems remain safe and secure, it’s important to have SSL certificates in place and up to date for the integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC). Yet because SSL certificates have set validity periods, can require frequent renewal, and appear on nearly every server in a data center, administrators may find themselves sighing when they have to pause their work to deal with yet another upcoming certificate renewal.
Fully automated iDRAC SSL certificate enrollment and renewal for organizations allows admins to cross this responsibility off their list. Certificate automation with Automatic Certificate Enrollment is a new feature in the latest version of iDRAC9, version 4.00.00.00 (or simply v4.0, as we’ll refer to it from now on) with Datacenter licenses.
At Principled Technologies, we found that enrolling or renewing a certificate without automation took nearly 2 minutes per server. Not having to keep up with the process at all could mean significant time savings for large server deployments. In fact, using iDRAC9 v4.0 to renew certificates for 1,000 servers every three months could save an administrator dozens of work days over three years. Automating this task with Automatic Certificate Enrollment also eliminates the time and effort for planning and tracking renewal cycles and removes the risk that servers become vulnerable should a certificate expire.
If you aren’t a data center administrator yourself, ask one. Removing the hassle of SSL certificate enrollment and renewal through automation with iDRAC9 Automatic Certificate Enrollment is something they’re sure to appreciate.