Technology never stops evolving — and neither do security threats. If your business still relies on spreadsheets or manual tracking for certificate management, you’re already falling behind.
Here are just some of today’s risks:
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Shorter lifespans: SSL/TLS certificate timelines are shrinking.
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Cryptographic risks are growing: As computing power increases, so does the risk of attackers using brute force to break encryption. Quantum computing is a looming reality.
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Security protocols keep changing: Today’s encryption standards won’t protect you tomorrow. Organizations need crypto-agility to adapt quickly to new threats and cryptographic changes.
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Manual processes can’t scale: Ad hoc scripts and spreadsheets can’t keep up with complex PKI environments. One missed certificate can mean outages, compliance failures, or worse.
To stay ahead, modern businesses are turning to automated certificate management. It also helps prepare for quantum computing and fast-changing security requirements.
Manual certificate management is no longer feasible
Certificate lifespans are getting shorter while the number of certificates a business needs is going up. Demand for updated, secure certificates is increasing exponentially, faster than most companies are equipped to deal with them. Therefore, your team will have to spend time and effort renewing certificates, rather than upgrading other security features, more often. Crypto-agility is a necessity to secure modern, connected businesses as certificate lifecycles shorten. With the current suggestion from certificate authorities down to 47 days by 2029, manual renewal processes have been rendered impractical and unsustainable.
Certificates exist across diverse environments across an organization’s architecture (on-premise, cloud-native, DevOps pipelines, containers, mobile apps, etc.), and they need constant monitoring and lifecycle management.
Spreadsheets, ticketing systems, or shell scripts create visibility gaps, slow response times, and introduce preventable failure points.
When a single certificate expiration can cause business-wide outages, your organization can’t afford to have any certificates slip between the cracks.
The employees responsible for manual certificate management can’t keep up with exponential certificate growth. Without centralized visibility and management, expired certificates can silently break production systems, interrupt customer-facing services, and erode trust.
Solving operational risks with certificate automation
Certificate automation resolves the risks and threats associated with orphaned, forgotten, or expired certificates across your organization.
Is your team ready for 47 days? Considering the tens of thousands or even millions of certificates needed by a modern organization, manual processes cannot scale to support the new 47-day certificate lifespans.
When certificates expire, the remote communication systems they were securing are interrupted, which can cause anything from rendering threat detection tools useless to completely shutting down access to your product or service.
Every second of downtime or an outage risks lost sales or revenue, disrupts operations, and could erode customer trust. Your organization likely has hundreds, thousands, or even more certificates at any given time. Just a single expired one could shut down your site or app.
Imagine your business has 150K certificates and two people on the security team managing them. That means each person is keeping eyes on 75K certificates, and they likely have other responsibilities beyond certificate renewal. Manual renewal processes significantly increase the chances that one or more of your certificates expires before it can be renewed or replaced.
With certificate automation, certificates are replaced before expiration without needing anyone to press a button, preventing downtime and business disruption.
Hidden or rogue certificates
Have you ever lost a key? It’s an easy mistake to make, and most people don’t even deal with many physical keys in their lifetimes.
Organizations manage thousands of certificates at any given time, and regular upgrades in security systems and tools can leave certificates (or keys to internal resources) behind. This doesn’t even consider the risk of having one employee manage thousands of keys on top of other vital security responsibilities.
Most organizations’ cloud-based architecture is expansive, encompassing dozens of interconnected tools and infrastructure. And each employee or contractor needs their own valid credentials to access the tools they need to do their jobs. This sprawl can result in unknown, unmanaged certificates that evade audits—and increase exposure to man-in-the-middle (MitM) and other attacks.
Automated certificate management creates a real-time, centralized map of all active certificates in your organization, even across multi-cloud environments.
Lack of governance
Manual certificate management creates confused processes with no clear governance or role-based access control. What happens if a single person is responsible for managing certificates and they leave the organization or intentionally insert rogue certificates secretly to access secure resources? What if someone else creates themselves certificates and the person in charge doesn’t know about them? Without governance, how would senior leaders become aware of these activities before significant damage can be done?
The principle of least privilege doesn’t work when your processes and existing systems don’t support restricting access for those who don’t need it. Certificate automation helps businesses enforce role-based access, issuance policies, and CA trust models for secure and auditable usage. Automation also helps detect threats like policy violations and breaches, gathering more information faster to find the root causes of a failure or incident.
Compliance failures
Regulations like PCI DSS and HIPAA require demonstrable control and auditability of certificate usage. A manual spreadsheet or a process built to handle a hundred certificates maximum will not pass those standards. Your PKI processes should be well-logged and documented—and strong automated processes are the most likely to be compliant.
Manual certificate reporting processes easily cause incomplete logs and out-of-date documentation. WIth certificate automation, built-in reporting and alerting features support continuous compliance and streamline audit preparation.
Reactive PKI operations waste time
The threat landscape is constantly shifting, and businesses that aren’t focusing on proactive security improvements fall behind, putting their organization at risk of breaches and other incidents. With reactive PKI operations, security teams waste time chasing certificates, managing outages, and responding to last-minute renewals instead of focusing on proactive risk management.
Your business’ security shouldn’t be an afterthought. Automating PKI ensures your security team can stay up-to-date with the latest risks and vulnerabilities to keep your protection strong.
Certificate automation uses self-service portals, API integration, and policy-driven automation to reduce the burden of PKI management on your team, creating and sustaining a strong security posture at less cost.
Don’t wait to adopt certificate automation
For businesses that want to remain secure as technology advances, automation isn’t a choice. On average, certificate outages cost businesses more than $300K every hour. If it takes a few hours to notice the issue and get a new certificate in place, your business could be out more than $1 million, and that’s for only one certificate. Computing power is increasing, and innovations like quantum computing could destroy the usefulness of current cryptographic policies and tools. Your business needs to align PKI and other security protocols with both current and future threats.
Most certificate outages are preventable incidents. With the right automation in place, outages aren’t an inevitability, potentially saving your company hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s not a future-state capability, it’s a current-state necessity.
Manual certificate management methods cannot keep pace with the velocity, volume, and visibility requirements of modern infrastructure. Implement certificate automation to position your organization for greater resiliency, crypto-agility, and regulatory compliance.
Explore how Keyfactor’s certificate automation solves the challenges of manual certificate management and prepares your organization for future PKI threats.
