Managing SAP Certificates: Automated Solution

Several user requests from a customer survey were incorporated into the development. The result: a significant increase in added value in automated SAP certificate management, which is becoming increasingly important as renewal cycles continue to shorten.

As renewal cycles for SAP certificates continue to shorten significantly, SAP Basis and infrastructure teams are facing increasing pressure to adapt. Automation solutions are a proven lever in addressing this challenge. We intend to take advantage of this momentum. Therefore, we will introduce a newly enhanced version of our SAP Certificate Management solution to the market in Q2.

The basis for the new features was a customer survey, particularly among customers who use the solution as part of EPOS. In general, the following became clear:

This means that customers would like the level of automation in certificate management to increase significantly.

At the same time, the core functions of the solution will of course remain in place. These include certificate monitoring with alerting, requesting and installing new certificates, verifying and replacing certificates, and deleting certificates that are no longer valid. All of this is highly automated and specifically designed for SAP environments, providing benefits such as cost and time savings as well as the use of best-practice processes.

One highlight of the new version of the SAP Certificate Management solution is a fully automated workflow for certificate renewals before expiration dates - without manual intervention and effectively within an automated process.

With a single click, certificate requests, certificate retrieval, validation, and installation in target systems are executed automatically.

An ACME client (in this case EPOS) sends a certificate request to the Certification Authority (CA), for example Let's Encrypt or any other CA, and verifies domain control via a challenge — typically HTTP-01, DNS-01, or TLS-ALPN-01. After successful validation, the CA automatically signs the certificate and returns it to the client, which then installs it directly in the target system. The entire process runs fully automatically, including renewal via cron job or timer.

Another highlight of the upcoming version of the SAP Certificate Management solution is the smart use of integrated step sequences/jobs in the form of guided workflows (Job 1 to 5).

There are also plans to extend certificate management to include integration with non-SAP systems.

In addition, work is underway to further develop the SAP Certificate Management solution toward “RISE readiness.” The availability of the new version is planned for Q2/26.