Higher Education Client Story

When a large university was looking for cybersecurity help, they turned to EDGE. According to practice lead, Brent Houk, the university was looking for help in deploying and managing their digital certificates. The university had workshopped some digital certificate automation ideas and needed some help with getting the roughed out plan to an actual deployment. The initial customer request centered on automating the deployment and renewal of digital certificates to a server farm consisting of more than 1,000 servers. The customer expressed how expired digital certificates can cause application and website outages so digital certificate auto renewal was a key problem to be solved.

In collaboration with EDGE Consulting, the university decided to use the open source technology from Let’s Encrypt. This product met the universities cost avoidance objectives. Let’s Encrypt uses a client application, “Certbot”, to install, manage, and automatically renew digital certificates. Our consultants worked along side the university IT professionals to deploy the solution and created solution diagrams and process documentation to set the path to success. Along the way, EDGE consultants scripted Certbot automation customized to the universities unique digital certificate architecture. The customer described the resulting deployment as elegant and cost-effective. The automation enablement is absolutely key given the limited university staff responsible for the cybersecurity mission.