The SA NREN Certificate Service provides beneficiary institutions with access to organisationally validated SSL, wildcard, and personal (S/MIME) certificates issued (either via ACME or manually) by a publicly trusted CA.
The service is operated by a third-party certificate authority under an agreement with TENET. Beneficiary institutions that make use of the service will be granted access to the CA provider’s portal to issue and manage certificates for their institution.
The SA NREN Certificate Service is available to public universities and statutory research and science institutions as part of our NREN services bundle at no additional cost. It is not available as a separate offering or to entities other than those listed.
To take advantage of this offering, you need to get the person normally authorised to place orders on TENET to request the service. A service order form must be completed and signed. Once provisioned, we will need to complete organisational validation before you can issue any certificates. This may require additional documentation.
The SA NREN certificate service is specifically scoped to a defined subset of AC.ZA domain holders — primarily public universities and statutory research councils — and is only available to institutions that have signed our REN Master Service Agreement. This allows us to keep the costs of the service down, and make it available to institutions that consume a bundle of NREN services at no additional cost.
In line with the general principles of TENET’s services, TENET expects that an institution’s designated service admins will act as the point of contact within their institution. Anyone acting as an admin of this service should have a general understanding of certificates and the concept of certification authorities.
Documentation for the service is available in TENET’s self-service portal knowledge base.
TENET provides first-tier support for the SA NREN Certificate Service and will manage escalations to the underlying provider where necessary. Designated institutional admins seeking support may log a call with TENET’s service desk. Note that support for the Certificate Service is only available during TENET’s normal office hours.
Non-service-related problems
Limited support may be provided for more general certificate-related problems (i.e. outside the scope of certificate service). This may include advice and assistance in understanding the concept of security certificates.
However, given the vast variety of possible software and configuration options, such support can only be provided on a best-effort basis with no service warranties. Requests not directly related to the certificate service itself will be attended to at a lower priority. Institutions are encouraged to use their software vendor’s support channels wherever possible, as these are better equipped to provide product-specific advice.