Digital certificates underpin every trusted connection in the enterprise, yet their management remains one of the most overlooked operational risks. Too often, certificates are tracked in spreadsheets or siloed tools, making it nearly impossible stay on top of expirations, who owns what, and which systems it authenticates.
As certificate volumes multiply across cloud, DevOps, and IoT environments, manual certificate management becomes a liability. Relying on a small team to maintain thousands of certificates in unstructured ways invites downtime, security incidents, and compliance failures.
Automation has become essential — not just for securing communications at scale, but for fundamental business performance. Organizations that treat certificate automation as a strategic capability respond faster to change, maintain trust at scale, and reduce operational drag.
These risks are exactly why we created The Automation Playbook — a practical guide with six critical pit stops to help teams accelerate visibility, compliance, and resilience.
But first, let’s dive into the risks that make automation no longer optional. This article explains what happens when manual tracking breaks down, and how modern certificate management can help your team restore control, prevent outages, and scale securely.
Why Manual Tracking Is Risky
- Lack of visibility. Spreadsheets only capture known certificates. Unknown/shadow certificates remain undiscovered and untracked until they expire.
- Resource-dependent. Keeping data current requires constant updates, and that means team members must be vigilant. It’s easy for vigilance to slide and for errors to accumulate quickly.
- Manual effort. Without automation, you’re renewing, revoking, and provisioning manually across multiple teams and certificate authorities (CAs).
- Error-prone. Manual processes are rife with errors. Missed entries, incorrect configurations, and unmonitored endpoints that can lead to expired certificates and unplanned outages
Many gaps can remain invisible until a web service goes down or a breach occurs. Recovery can take from hours to days to locate and renew an expired certificate. Simply put, manual tracking fails because it can’t scale with today’s certificate volume, velocity, and diversity.
Real-World Impacts
Here’s what can happen when you use manual certificate management methods:
- Outages and unplanned downtime. Expired certificates mean visitors may not be able to access websites. APIs won’t work, and internal users won’t be able to access resources.
- High priority tasks are pushed to the back burner. When a certificate fails, other tasks, such as audits, are delayed because teams’ resources are diverted to addressing the issue.
- Increased audit and compliance gaps. Without full visibility or audit trails, teams struggle to prove control over keys and certificates during compliance reviews.
- Added costs. Repeated failures are very expensive, demonstrate weak governance, and can damage customer loyalty.
Think of certificate management as a form of inventory management. You wouldn’t manage your inventory manually. You want to know which certificates you have at any given time and what their status is. Otherwise, you’re not practicing good governance. The path forward isn’t to fix the spreadsheet; it’s to replace manual oversight with continuous discovery, automation, and accountability. In the next section, we’ll explain how to make that happen.
Why Transition to an Automated Certificate Management Solution
Automating your certificate management processes offers several benefits:
- Scalability. Automation can scale up to discover certificates across the enterprise, then track them to ensure they’re renewed on time.
- Compliance. Visibility into your certificates makes it easier to comply with standards and regulations. When audit time comes around, it’s easier to find the information you need.
- Governance. A principle of good governance is visibility into your cryptographic assets. You can’t govern what you don’t know exists, and automated discovery solves that problem.
Growing Cryptographic Risks
We’re entering the age of quantum computing. Powerful computers harnessing the power of quantum physics will soon be able to solve some of the world’s intractable problems. However, these computers will also easily overcome current encryption measures, leaving your data vulnerable.
Some hackers aren’t even waiting until quantum computing matures. They’re launching harvest now, decrypt later attacks, stealing encrypted data, and holding onto it until they can decipher it.
That’s why certificate management matters more than ever. It’s part of cryptoagility, which refers to the capabilities necessary to replace and adapt cryptographic algorithms for protocols, applications, software, hardware, and infrastructures without interrupting a system’s operations. Automated certificate management enables you to update your certificates to protect data without interrupting operations.
3 Steps to Certificate Management Automation
Assess Your Maturity
The first step toward modernizing certificate management is understanding your maturity level. Many organizations are at the earliest stages of maturity, meaning that they rely on partial visibility, manual renewals, and CA-provided tools that only manage their own certificates, not the full environment.
The goal is to identify which processes can be automated so you can establish a priority list. A priority list helps you document the plan to increase maturity.
Choose the Right Certificate Management Solutions
Effective certificate management is knowing every certificate, across every CA, platform, and environment — and automating its lifecycle from issuance to renewal.
Essential features of a certificate management solution include:
- Centralized discovery and inventory across all certificates (public and private)
- End-to-end lifecycle automation to issue, renew, and revoke without manual intervention
- Integration with IT service management (ITSM) systems for request workflows and escalation
- Role-based access control to assign ownership and permissions while maintaining least privilege
- Multi-CA flexibility that allows you to manage certificates from any authority to avoid vendor lock-in
- Real-time visibility with dashboards and reporting for audits and compliance
Create a Transition Plan
- Map your environment. Understand what assets you have, so you can best understand your risks. Identify all known CAs, applications, and devices that rely on certificates; use discovery tools to find unknowns.
- Prioritize the impacts to the business. Start with the costs and issues directly relating to customer revenue. Also, assess which systems have longer return time objective (they might need to be prioritized).
- Launch a pilot automation project. Select one domain or application to deploy lifecycle automation. Examples include auto-renewal, binding, and provisioning. The pilot project will give you insight into what steps you need to take for a successful implementation across the board.
- Integrate and expand. Connect to your ITSM workflows, DevOps pipelines, and cloud infrastructure for broader adoption.
Throughout the project, keep track of how things are working. Use the data to report on the ROI gained from reduced outages, faster renewals, and fewer manual hours.
Preparation for automation turns certificate management from a reactive pain point to a predictable process that follows good governance best practices.
Automated Certificate Management for Digital Trust
Valid certificates enable websites and web services to work the way they’re supposed to. They’re a pillar of digital trust.
Manually managing certificates can damage that digital trust; it only works in situations where there are a handful of certificates. When those numbers grow into the thousands across hybrid environments, manual management becomes impossible. Certificates go untracked, and outages, audit failures, and wasted staff hours follow.
Adopting a certificate management solution is vital for digital trust. With Keyfactor Command, you can see every certificate in one place, automate renewals to eliminate manual work and surprise outages, and enforce consistent policies across your entire environment — without re-engineering your existing infrastructure.
Pit Stop to Performance: Making the Case for Automation
Today’s successful organizations treat automation as a performance technology rather than a compliance checkbox.
Looking to level up? Pull into the pit lane and refuel your strategy by reading The Automation Playbook. It’s your crew chief’s guide for thriving in the 47-day era, complete with six proven plays to keep your operations visible, compliant, and race-ready.
🏁 Grab your copy and get back on track – faster, smarter, and built to win.
