Digital trust is constantly changing. It’s no longer just about passwords, SSL certificates, or clunky manual PKI tools.
To survive this constantly changing ecosystem, your business must create an agile, seamless security strategy that doesn’t disrupt operations. This flexibility is called crypto-agility. Today’s organizations also need visibility into where cryptography is used – across apps, infrastructure, and third-party ecosystems – to proactively detect risks before they escalate. This is why cryptographic discovery is becoming a top priority for modern security teams.
Curious about what crypto-agility really means in practice? Let’s first break it down and then explore four real-world use cases where it makes a critical difference.
What Crypto-Agility Really Means
Crypto-agility is simply how easily your business can switch between cryptographic algorithms and protocols, whenever needed, to address emerging threats, vulnerabilities, or changes in security standards.
When implemented properly, crypto-agility ensures that an organization can quickly adapt to new cryptographic challenges without sacrificing security. However, crypto-agility isn’t just one tool in a security toolkit – it’s a foundational strategy that strengthens the entire trust architecture, especially considering how quickly security standards evolve.
With the ability to automatically discover and inventory cryptographic assets across your environment, your organization can strengthen that agility with data-driven insights. After all, true agility means being able to integrate and replace cryptographic algorithms across every part of your environment, whether that’s your apps, infrastructure, or embedded systems, without missing a beat.
4 Use Cases for a New PKI Mindset
A new PKI mindset focuses on applications beyond traditional web server security. It focuses on device authentication, cloud application access, and securing communication between microservices and containers. This shift also encompasses Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) security, vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and emerging digital platforms.
This mindset opens the door to building a crypto-agile platform that is more scalable and secure across your organization without the usual headaches.
Below are some use cases of this new PKI shift.
Cloud Native Applications
According to Tigera’s 2022 State of Cloud Native Security report, over 75% of companies are now using cloud-native applications – and with them come containers and microservices that spin up and down fast, sometimes in a matter of seconds.
Traditional PKI wasn’t built for today’s speed or volume. It assumes certificates live for months – or even years – and relies heavily on manual processes. But as certificate lifespans shrink to 90 and then just 47 days, those assumptions no longer hold.
If you’re still managing certificates manually, the pressure quickly adds up. Renewals happen constantly. Even when everything goes smoothly, each one can take hours – between the request, approval, provisioning, installation, and validation. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of certificates, and it’s clear: the current pace isn’t sustainable.
You need a trust architecture that can keep up. One that’s built for speed, scale, and constant change.
That doesn’t mean flipping a switch to full automation overnight – it means starting a journey. Before you can automate, you need to know what you’re working with. And that begins with visibility: discovering where certificates live, who owns them, how they’re used, and when they expire.
From there, it’s about building ownership and governance – so no cert is left unmanaged and no renewal falls through the cracks. Only then can automation truly scale.
With crypto-agility at the core of your PKI strategy, you can move toward short-lived certificates by default – rotated automatically, issued in real time, and deeply integrated into workflows. You get the speed and security PKI promises, without the drag of outdated processes.
DevSecOps
If your developers accidentally use weak algorithms, outdated protocols, or self-signed certs, it’s not just a bug – it’s a trust liability that could open the door to serious breaches or compliance issues down the road.
That’s why you need to catch cryptographic issues early – before the code ever leaves your CI/CD pipeline. Instead of waiting until the end of the release process, bake cryptographic checks and policy enforcement right into your build and deployment stages. Automate it. That way, every commit is scanned for risky implementations, and only secure, compliant code makes it to production.
But blocking bad code is not enough. You also need to empower your Devs with the right tools. Give them access to pre-approved cryptographic libraries, sanctioned certificate authorities, and automation that keeps everything in sync with your security policies. This is what crypto-agility looks like in practice: not just fast adaptation, but smart, built-in guardrails that help your teams ship secure code without slowing them down.
IoT
With over 18 million IoT devices in use today, you’d expect regular updates like those for typical apps – but that’s rarely the case. These devices often run for years or even decades, and many are hard to patch. Without a forward-looking strategy, you risk locking in outdated or vulnerable cryptography with no simple fix.
That’s where crypto-agility becomes essential. With a crypto-agile security strategy, you can handle vulnerability and patch management on demand without needing manual intervention every time a new threat emerges. Keyfactor’s PKI for IoT delivers a turnkey solution to issue and manage certificates at scale.
As IoT ecosystems grow more complex, the ability to discover where cryptographic methods are used – especially in embedded firmware or third-party components – has become just as important as managing them, enabling faster and more targeted remediation.
Third Party and Supply Chain
Your vendors and partners are essentially part of your extended trust boundary, so it’s completely normal to expect visibility into how they manage cryptography and plan for agility.
You can (and should) use contracts, SLAs, and shared policy frameworks to align your cryptographic standards across all parties. Documenting clear policy guidelines ensures that everyone, from internal teams to third-party providers, is on the same page when it comes to managing keys, certificates, and algorithm upgrades.
Providing clear guidelines for third-party and supply chain vendors isn’t just good governance – it’s a form of strong crypto-agility. You’re building a coordinated defense that extends beyond your walls, so no weak link puts the whole chain at risk.
The Role of the Modern PKI Champion
Your organization needs consistent, provable trust across your cloud-native applications, automated pipelines, API-first architectures, and zero-trust frameworks to secure, govern, and audit every interaction.
Essentially, you need PKI to provide the foundational tools for securing, authenticating, and encrypting communications across all digital interactions.
For the custodians of these keys, provisioning SSL certificates and signatures is no longer enough. PKI champions must become architects of digital trust in a dynamic terrain.
Here’s how modern PKI champions can achieve this:
- Advocate the use of third-party PKI-as-a-Service (PKIaaS) tools like Keyfactor Command to deliver trust on demand to any system, user, or device.
- Collaborate across domains – like DevOps, Cloud or IoT – to embed crypto-agility into every workflow.
- Encourage vendors to support modern protocols, strong defaults, and built-in agility, not just checkboxes on RFPs.
- Keep PKI aligned with business goals: security, customer confidence, and long-term resilience.
The Future of Digital Trust
Digital environments today are borderless, users are increasingly remote, workloads are short-lived, and infrastructure is distributed. Access to a company’s digital assets is easy for threat actors, provided they know which vulnerability to probe.
To prevent compromise, the future of digital trust must be adaptive. It has to exist beyond certificates, signatures, and other conventional solutions. Ensure that your PKI strategy can easily adapt to changes – especially with post-quantum cryptography on the horizon.
