After CPS becomes part of your contract, you can access it from ​Akamai Control Center​. But before you do that, let's cover a few things first.

Technical contact

Before you begin, you need a technical contact that's outside your organization. This should be the person from your ​Akamai​ account team that you work closest with. Both your local administrator contact and this technical contact will receive communications while the certificate is being validated. Talk to your ​​Akamai​ account team to get:

• A first and last name
• A valid, ​Akamai​ domain email address
• A phone number

Certificate types

Depending on the validation type, there are four different types of certificates that you can create:

Domain-validated (DV) certificate. Determines if your company has control of the domains listed in your certificate. This is the simplest validation method but also has the shortest expiration date (90 days), which means you'll have to renew your certificate more frequently. However, this certificate renewal process can be automated.

Organization-validated (OV) certificate. Contacts an assigned person in your organization for validation that your business is registered, the contact works there, and you have legal right to use the domains listed in your certificate. Because this validation process involves human contact, it can't be entirely automated. OV certificates expire after one year.

Extended-validation (EV) certificate. Works the same way as the organization-validated certificate with an additional EV-approval contact. This process also involves signed letters and notaries sent to your certificate authority for validation. This method provides a credential that can be used to indicate in a browser that your certificate is trustworthy. This also expires after one year.

Third-party certificate. Allows you to obtain a certificate from a CA of your choice. Certificates managed by CPS must be issued either by DigiCert or Let's Encrypt. If you want to use a different CA, you must create a third-party certificate. In this case, you use CPS to generate a certificate signing request, then you need to submit the CSR to your CA yourself, and receive both the signed certificate and the trust chain back from the CA. After you obtain this information, you upload the signed certificate and trust chain to CPS.

Let's get started

1. Open ​Akamai Control Center​ and select your account from the menu at the top of the screen.

2. Go to ☰ > CDN > Certificates. The CPS interface appears.

3. Use these instructions to:

   • Create a third-party certificate
   • Create an extended-validated certificate
   • Create an organization-validated certificate
   • Create a domain-validated certificate

4. After you create your certificate, explore how you can manage your certificate and its deployment:

   • Manage certificates
   • Manage certificate deployment