When a certificate expires unexpectedly, the impact is immediate. Applications go offline. Customer-facing services break. Engineering teams scramble to diagnose what went wrong, often spending hours tracing an outage back to a single expired or misconfigured certificate.
These incidents are not edge cases. They are predictable consequences of how most organizations manage certificates today: manually, across fragmented systems, without centralized visibility. And they are expensive.
An independent Forrester Total Economic Impact study (introduced in our first post in this series, The real cost of PKI: what certificate management actually costs your organization) found that a composite enterprise, modeled around the organizations interviewed for the study, experienced between 18 and 22 certificate-related incidents per year, with each incident costing an average of $100,000 in lost productivity, customer disruption, and revenue impact.
The good news: these outages are preventable. This post examines the root causes, breaks down the financial exposure, and shows how organizations are eliminating certificate-related downtime through visibility and automation.
What causes certificate-related outages
Certificate outages rarely stem from a single failure. They are the result of compounding gaps in visibility, process, and coordination. Three patterns account for the majority of incidents.
Expired certificates nobody knew were expiring
The most common cause of a certificate outage is the simplest: a certificate expired because no one was tracking it. The 18 to 22 certificate-related incidents per year are driven primarily by visibility gaps across large, distributed certificate estates.
Too many organizations do not have a reliable inventory of every certificate in their environment. As one webinar participant described: “Most organizations don’t actually know how many certificates they have, they don’t know where they live, they don’t know who’s responsible for them.”
When certificates are scattered across teams, servers, cloud environments, and applications with no centralized tracking, problems arising from some expired certificates become a matter of when, not if.
One retail security leader recalled the situation before centralized management: “Before Keyfactor, there were several outages a year that would require a lot of troubleshooting and manual work.”
Incorrect certificate installation
Even when teams do catch an expiring certificate, the renewal process itself introduces risk. Manual certificate deployment is error-prone, particularly in complex environments with multiple dependencies and deployment targets.
A telecom organization described the pattern clearly: “Even when people manually renewed their certificates, they wouldn’t get them installed correctly. They would miss a spot or [dependency] and we’d get an outage.”
Installation errors were a common theme across the organizations Forrester studied. The problem is not that teams lack competence; it is that manual deployment at scale introduces too many opportunities for human error.
Shadow IT and fragmented visibility
In many organizations, certificate management is decentralized by default. Individual teams procure and manage their own certificates using their own tools and processes, with no coordination across the organization.
The Forrester study described it directly: “Some teams maintained their own tools and processes, further obscuring certificate landscape visibility and contributing to increased security risk.”
This fragmentation creates blind spots. Certificates issued outside centralized governance are effectively invisible to security teams. One banking organization’s SVP described being “quite nervous before they had full visibility of their cert environment at what certs they didn’t know were there.”
Shadow certificates represent the highest-risk category of certificate-related outages, because by definition, no one is watching them.
What certificate outages actually cost
Certificate outages carry costs that extend far beyond the time it takes to restore service. The financial exposure is substantial and measurable.
$100,000 per incident (and that is the average)
The Forrester study quantified the average cost of a certificate-related incident at $100,000, encompassing lost employee productivity, customer-facing service disruption, and revenue impact. For organizations experiencing often tens of such incidents per year, cumulative exposure is significant.
Over three years, the risk-adjusted present value of incident-related costs reached $3.6 million for the composite organization. And these figures represent averages. For organizations in industries where downtime carries regulatory or contractual penalties, the per-incident cost can be substantially higher.
One telecom organization estimated the cost of a single major outage at “hundreds of thousands per hour or more.”
As an enterprise leader summarized: “The return on cost for Keyfactor is incredibly high. Probably in the millions of dollars a year by reducing [certificate] outages.”
How organizations are reducing incidents by 95%
The most compelling finding from the Forrester study is not the size of the problem, but the speed at which organizations solved it. After deploying Keyfactor, the composite organization reduced certificate-related incidents by 85% in year one, 90% in year two, and 95% by year three.
One retail security leader reported: “In the past year, five years, we’ve only had one [expired certificate] with minimal downtime.”
These reductions result from addressing the root causes directly. Centralized discovery eliminates the visibility gaps that allow certificates to expire unnoticed. Automated renewals remove human error from the renewal process. Automated deployment ensures certificates are installed correctly and completely. Read more about the deployment and automation journey in Post 4: PKI modernization in months, not years: a practical guide to fast deployment
When every certificate is visible, every renewal is automated, and every deployment is validated, the conditions that cause outages simply stop recurring.
The security risk you can’t see
Certificate outages cause downtime. But certificates also create security vulnerabilities that are harder to detect and potentially more damaging.
Certificates as attack vectors
The Forrester study found that approximately 5% of security incidents involving external or internal attacks are related to certificate vulnerabilities. For the observed organizations, this translated to a cumulative cost of $5.086 million, with a 68% likelihood of occurrence.
On an annualized basis, that works out to approximately $96,800 in addressable certificate-related security risk. After deploying Keyfactor, organizations reduced this exposure by 50%, yielding a risk-adjusted annual benefit of approximately $41,000 and a three-year present value of $102,000.
These figures represent a conservative floor rather than a ceiling. The Forrester methodology risk-adjusts downward to account for variability. For organizations in regulated industries or those managing sensitive customer data, the actual security value of centralized certificate governance is likely significantly higher.
Compliance and audit benefits
Centralized certificate visibility does more than prevent outages and reduce attack surfaces. It also transforms the compliance and audit experience.
When every certificate is inventoried, tracked, and governed from a single platform, auditors can verify certificate posture in a fraction of the time. The Forrester study found that audit processes became 30% more efficient after Keyfactor deployment.
This matters increasingly as regulatory frameworks tighten. PCI DSS 4.0, DORA, and the EU Cyber Resilience Act all impose requirements on cryptographic asset management and certificate governance. Organizations that lack centralized visibility face growing audit burden and compliance risk.
One banking SVP described the broader strategic value: the visibility that Keyfactor provides positions their organization for post-quantum readiness, giving them a clear inventory of every cryptographic asset before the transition to quantum-safe algorithms begins.
A retail security leader highlighted the operational dimension: a centralized dashboard providing certificate visibility across countries, enabling consistent governance at global scale.
How Keyfactor can help
Keyfactor’s platform addresses each of the root causes outlined in this post:
- Discover and inventory every certificate.
Keyfactor Command provides a single pane of glass across all certificate authorities, cloud environments, and network endpoints. No more shadow certificates, no more blind spots. - Automate renewals to prevent expiration.
Automated certificate lifecycle management eliminates the most common cause of outages: certificates that expire because no one was tracking them. - Automate deployment to prevent installation errors.
Automated provisioning and deployment removes manual steps, eliminating the configuration errors that cause outages even after successful renewal. Read more about automation at scale in Post 3: Certificate lifecycle automation: how to manage certificates at enterprise scale - Improve security posture and audit readiness.
Centralized governance strengthens cryptographic security, reduces attack surface, and makes compliance verification dramatically more efficient.
Download the full Forrester Total Economic Impact study to see the complete methodology and detailed findings behind these results.
Got questions? We’ve got answers.
What is the average cost of a certificate-related outage?
An independent Forrester study found the average cost of a certificate-related incident is $100,000, accounting for lost employee productivity, customer disruption, and revenue impact. For industries with contractual or regulatory penalties, the per-incident cost can be significantly higher.
How many certificate-related outages do organizations experience per year?
The Forrester study documented 18 to 22 certificate-related incidents per year for an organization modeled around the enterprises interviewed. These incidents were primarily caused by expired certificates, installation errors, and fragmented visibility across the certificate estate.
What are the main causes of certificate outages?
Three root causes account for the majority of incidents: certificates expiring because no one was tracking them, incorrect installation during manual renewal, and shadow certificates managed outside centralized governance. All three are visibility and process problems, not technology failures.
How quickly can organizations reduce certificate outages?
Organizations deploying Keyfactor reduced certificate-related incidents by 85% in the first year, 90% in the second year, and 95% by the third year. The improvement comes from automated discovery, renewal, and deployment that eliminate the root causes of outages.
How do certificate vulnerabilities create security risk?
Approximately 5% of security incidents involving external or internal attacks relate to certificate vulnerabilities. Expired, misconfigured, or untracked certificates can create openings for attackers. Centralized certificate management reduces this exposure by ensuring every certificate is visible, current, and properly governed.
What compliance frameworks require certificate management?
PCI DSS 4.0, DORA, and the EU Cyber Resilience Act all include requirements related to cryptographic asset management and certificate governance. Centralized certificate visibility and lifecycle automation help organizations meet these requirements while reducing audit burden by approximately 30%.
How does Keyfactor prevent certificate outages?
Keyfactor Command discovers and inventories every certificate across all CAs, cloud environments, and endpoints. Automated lifecycle management handles renewals and deployment, eliminating the manual processes that cause the vast majority of outages. Organizations gain a single source of truth for their entire certificate estate.
What is the ROI of preventing certificate outages?
The incident reduction benefit alone is worth $3.6 million in risk-adjusted present value over three years. Combined with security posture improvements ($102,000 PV) and the broader operational savings covered in our cost analysis, the total ROI of PKI modernization reaches 356%.
