Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) sits behind almost everything we call secure on the internet. It is present when your browser displays a lock icon, when a mobile app communicates with an API, when a developer signs a build artifact, and when a device in a lab authenticates to a gateway. PKI is a framework of cryptographic technologies, policies, and trust hierarchies that manage digital certificates and encryption keys. PKI verifies identity, shields conversations from prying eyes, and protects data from alteration as it is transmitted. PKI functions silently in the background; hence, it’s often taken for granted, treated as an invisible utility that “just works.”
Many organizations still run PKI as if it were a utility. A certificate authority established years ago remains operational. Renewals are tracked in a sheet that is updated periodically by someone who remembers to do so. A handful of experts know where the most sensitive keys live, but not many others do. Everything feels fine until a certificate expires at the wrong moment and a service blinks off, that’s when things can escalate in an organization.
Below, we discuss why PKI controls cannot wait and how teams can maintain them without slowing down the work that moves the business.
PKI is the Foundation We Rely on
PKI delivers four simple outcomes that anyone can understand. It provides authentication by verifying digital identities, ensures confidentiality through encryption of data in transit, maintains integrity by detecting any tampering or modification, and enforces non-repudiation by proving that an action or transaction originated from a verified entity. These outcomes turn into real experiences. A patient portal that allows families to view test results with confidence. A bank that handles millions of logins a day without exposing credentials. A software provider that ships updates customers can trust. A factory that onboards new devices without on-site technicians typing passwords into small screens.
Although the technology remains the same, where and how it operates have changed vastly. Certificates are everywhere, from mobile applications to securing API calls between microservices. They are used to authenticate devices and secure tunnels between cloud regions and are widely adopted. The widespread distribution of certificates often makes it difficult to maintain visibility into where they reside and what resources they secure. It also becomes hard to maintain consistent lifecycles. If ownership is unclear and renewal timing is not automated, an organization starts to accumulate small risks that eventually pile up on a bad day.
Reasons to treat PKI as a First-Class Platform
Moving ahead, we should acknowledge what changed. Modern environments are complex because they include several cloud providers, on-premises systems that will stay for years, and agile platforms such as Kubernetes. With daily deployments and real-time infrastructure changes, the number of certificates in use has expanded from hundreds to hundreds of thousands. A team that once approved a few certificate requests each month now manages dozens every hour. None of this is a reason to pull back from automation or cloud adoption. A team that once approved a handful of requests a month now sees dozens each hour. None of this is a reason to pull back from automation or cloud adoption.
Treating PKI as a first-class platform is no longer optional; it is the only way to maintain visibility, automation, and compliance in environments where certificates are created, renewed, and revoked at machine speed.
- PKI directly impacts uptime. Certificates now sit in front of every critical service. A single missed renewal can take entire environments offline.
- Security posture depends on trust, not firewalls. Machine-to-machine authentication, API security, and code signing all rely on healthy PKI.
- Compliance mandates continuous visibility. Standards such as FIPS 140-3, NIST SP 800-57, PCI DSS v4.0, and NIS 2 expect demonstrable control of keys and certificates.
- Automation has changed the scale of risk. Certificates are created by scripts and pipelines; policies and audits must live there, too.
- Multi-CA environments need a single source of truth. When multiple certificate authorities operate independently, tracking issuance and revocation becomes impossible without a unifying platform.
- Engineering velocity and governance can coexist. Treating PKI as a service allows developers to request compliant certificates instantly through APIs rather than waiting on manual reviews.
- Audits become proof, not panic. When PKI is a managed platform, evidence of issuance, approval, and renewal is captured automatically.
What Happens if PKI is Neglected?
If PKI is not properly governed, the problems that arise are predictable. A critical service can suddenly go down because of a certificate tied to a shared component that everyone forgot about, an audit can uncover that renewals are still being tracked through emails and calendar reminders, and a security review can reveal that a code-signing key was never migrated to a hardware security module because no one wanted to schedule the required downtime.
When PKI isn’t properly governed, failure scenarios are both predictable and painful. Below are the most common outcomes organizations experience:
Unplanned Outages from Expired Certificates
Services can abruptly stop working when a TLS certificate expires unnoticed. Often, it’s not the visible web application that fails first, but an internal dependency, such as a reverse proxy, API gateway, or message broker. In some cases, the monitoring or alerting system that could have detected the issue uses the same certificate for authentication, leaving teams unaware of the outage until customers begin to complain.
Poor Key Hygiene and Lost Private Keys
When private keys are scattered across servers, laptops, and build agents, tracking their custody becomes nearly impossible. Engineers may copy keys between environments for “temporary” fixes or store them unencrypted in configuration files. Months later, no one remembers which version is current or whether it was ever rotated. This lack of key lifecycle management directly violates NIST SP 800-57 recommendations and FIPS 140-3 key protection compliance requirements.
Manual and Error-Prone Renewal Processes
Many organizations still rely on spreadsheets, ticketing systems, or email reminders to manage certificate renewals. These human-dependent processes often miss deadlines, leading to near-miss incidents or complete outages. From a compliance standpoint, DORA and PCI DSS v4.0 both expect automated, auditable renewal workflows, not reminders sitting in inboxes.
Weak Cryptographic Configurations Left Unaddressed
Without centralized oversight, outdated algorithms such as SHA-1, RSA-1024, or deprecated TLS versions can persist for years. Teams may continue using them in internal services because “it still works.” But as regulators align with NIST SP 800-131A guidelines on acceptable key strengths and ciphers, these aging configurations represent compliance debt waiting to be discovered in an audit.
Lack of Hardware Protection for Sensitive Keys
Cryptographic signing keys used to authenticate code, containers, or APIs are sometimes stored in software keystores instead of Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). Without proper access control, these unprotected keys can be copied or exfiltrated from build servers or developer workstations, especially if credentials are shared or a system is compromised. Storing high-value signing keys outside validated FIPS 140-3 HSMs or cloud Key Management Services (KMS) weakens both security and non-repudiation, leaving organizations vulnerable to supply chain attacks.
Inconsistent Certificate Reuse Across Environments
Under pressure, teams sometimes reuse wildcard certificates or copy internal certs across clusters for convenience. This practice breaks isolation, complicates incident response, and increases the blast radius of a single compromise. It also makes it difficult to enforce a unique identity per workload, a key expectation under Zero Trust and NIS 2 frameworks.
Audit Findings and Regulatory Gaps
When auditors request evidence of certificate ownership, issuance approvals, or revocation records, teams without centralized logs are required to manually assemble the data. This often results in incomplete documentation or inconsistent evidence. Frameworks like DORA and ISO 27001 now treat certificate lifecycle visibility as an operational resilience metric, meaning a missing inventory can translate directly into audit findings.
Reputational and Customer Impact
From the user’s perspective, an expired or untrusted certificate means one thing: your service isn’t secure. Browsers flag warnings, mobile apps fail to connect, and customers question whether their data is safe. Restoring confidence takes far longer than renewing the certificate that caused the issue.
Compliance is not just a Legal Concern
Regulations around the world are converging on a shared principle: demonstrating digital resilience is impossible without clear control and visibility over your cryptographic assets. Whether it’s a bank, a healthcare provider, or a government agency, regulators now treat PKI not as a background security layer but as a regulated operational control that must be continuously verifiable.
Different frameworks highlight this from distinct angles:
- DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) in the EU views PKI as a component of operational resilience. Financial entities must prove that their cryptographic mechanisms, such as CAs, keys, and certificates, are governed, traceable, and recoverable under incident conditions. DORA Articles 9 and 11 explicitly require identification of “critical ICT third-party dependencies,” which include trust services and certificate authorities.
- PCI DSS v4.0 expects ongoing validation of encryption strength and certificate lifecycles within payment systems. Requirements 3 and 4 mandate that cryptographic keys and digital certificates use algorithms compliant with NIST SP 800-131A and be rotated or revoked according to documented policy. Auditors often request raw evidence of certificate expiry reports, renewal automation, and HSM key custody logs.
- NIS 2 Directive expands these expectations beyond financial entities to all essential and important service providers. It demands risk-based management of cryptographic material, verification of digital trust services, and proof that keys can be revoked quickly across distributed systems, something only a mature PKI control plane can provide.
- FIPS 140-3 and NIST SP 800-57 Part 1 define the technical baseline for key generation, protection, and retirement. They expect cryptographic operations to occur within validated modules and for key ownership to be documented. During assessments, auditors often request HSM configuration proofs, tamper logs, and evidence of dual-control key ceremonies.
- ISO 27001 and SOC 2 frameworks link PKI governance to access control, change management, and incident response. Under these audits, certificate issuance and revocation events are treated as part of the organization’s security monitoring posture.
DevOps and Security
The tension between security and development teams is nothing new, especially when it comes to certificates. Developers prioritize speed. Security teams are built to minimize risk. In PKI, that friction typically manifests as delays. A developer needs a certificate for a new API or container service, but the request has to go through a ticket queue. The CA team manually approves it, provisions it, and sends it back days later. By then, the sprint is over, or the developer has already spun up a self-signed cert just to keep testing. That one shortcut slowly becomes a security blind spot that no one remembers until it is exposed in production.
The way out isn’t stricter rules, it’s smarter integration. PKI needs to live inside the same automation pipelines developers already use.
- In CI/CD environments: add a stage to your Jenkins, GitLab, or Azure DevOps pipeline that calls a certificate API or ACME endpoint. The pipeline automatically requests, installs, and validates the cert before deployment. No emails, no tickets, no waiting.
- For dynamic or short-lived workloads: support ephemeral certificates with lifetimes measured in hours or days, issued and renewed automatically through your PKI control plane. This matches the pace of microservices and reduces long-term exposure to private keys.
- For code and container signing: integrate HSM-protected keys into the build system through PKCS#11 or cloud KMS APIs. Sign artifacts directly in the pipeline so developers never handle raw keys.
When PKI becomes a service, agility and control stop being opposites; developers continue pushing at full speed, while the security team keeps full visibility and policy enforcement.
A Practical Path that Teams can Follow
Every organization starts from a different point, but the pattern of successful programs looks similar. Discovery tools run against public endpoints, internal networks, clusters, and cloud resources. Data from certificate authorities is pulled in and compared against what the scanners see. Certificates are linked to owners and to the systems they protect. Unknown items are investigated. The goal is not to be perfect on day one. The goal is to reduce surprises.
1. Start with Deep Discovery
The first step is knowing exactly what certificates you have and where they live. Most organizations have certificates spread across public websites, internal servers, Kubernetes clusters, and different cloud platforms, often issued by multiple certificate authorities (CAs).
To get a full picture, teams can use certificate discovery tools that scan the network and connect to CAs through APIs. These tools collect details such as the certificate’s issuer, algorithm, key length, and expiry date.
2. Build a Policy Baseline
Once discovery produces a trusted inventory, policies can move from paper to enforcement.
Teams can define:
- Trusted CA list and issuance scope (which internal and external CAs can issue for which domains or workloads).
- Cryptographic standards aligned with NIST SP 800-131A and FIPS 140-3, specifying approved key sizes, signature algorithms (RSA-2048, ECC-P256, Ed25519), and validity periods.
- Naming and SAN conventions that tie certificates to real assets and owners.
- Key storage requirements, mandating that root and code-signing keys live in HSMs or cloud KMS services with tamper-evident logging.
- Delegation and approval workflows, so issuance is auditable and revocation authority is clear.
3. Automate Policy
Next comes operationalization.
Policies can be embedded into automation systems using standard protocols such as ACME, EST, or vendor APIs.
- Load balancers, ingress controllers, and service mesh can automatically enroll and renew certificates from approved profiles.
- CI/CD pipelines can call certificate issuance APIs during infrastructure provisioning.
- IoT gateways can manage device renewals using mutual TLS and short-lived certs.
- Renewal workflows can be validated against policy before deployment, preventing outdated algorithms or unapproved CAs from being used.
4. Mature Toward Crypto-Agility
Finally, teams can prepare for the evolution of cryptography. All new systems can be validated to support crypto agility, the ability to swap RSA or ECC keys with post-quantum algorithms. Test environments can begin piloting hybrid certificates (for example, ECDSA + Dilithium) to evaluate interoperability with load balancers and clients. By planning for crypto-agility early, organizations can align testing, policy, and infrastructure in a single roadmap, turning future algorithm transitions under upcoming FIPS revisions or EU digital trust regulations into routine upgrades instead of large-scale reissuance crises.
Crypto Agility
Cryptography never stands still. Algorithms that were secure a decade ago, such as RSA-1024, SHA-1, and 3DES, are now deprecated. Even strong algorithms like RSA-2048 and ECDSA-P256 are on a timeline: they remain trusted today, but their long-term safety is limited by advances in computing power and the looming impact of quantum cryptanalysis.
The post-quantum cryptography (PQC) transition, led by NIST’s PQC standardization project, marks the next major evolution in encryption. New algorithms, such as CRYSTALS-Kyber (for key establishment) and CRYSTALS-Dilithium or ML-DSA (for digital signatures), have been approved as federal standards, defining the first generation of quantum-resistant cryptographic mechanisms. These standards include FIPS 203 for Kyber, FIPS 204 for Dilithium, FIPS 205 for SPHINCS+. With these standards in place, organizations must begin planning to rotate existing RSA and ECC keys and reissue potentially millions of certificates across hardware, firmware, and cloud workloads.
That kind of change can’t be handled through manual renewal cycles or spreadsheets. It requires crypto-agility, which means designing your PKI and applications to absorb algorithm changes without breaking services.
Achieving it depends on a few concrete capabilities:
- Full Cryptographic Inventory: Know exactly where each algorithm and key size is used; TLS endpoints, code-signing, VPNs, firmware updates, IoT devices, and API certificates. Tools that integrate with the PKI control plane can tag certificates by algorithm (e.g., RSA-2048, ECC-P384, Ed25519) to identify weak or soon-to-expire cryptographic dependencies.
- Policy-Driven Profiles: Define certificate profiles that enforce approved algorithms and key sizes based on NIST guidance. When those profiles are coded into the CA or automation tool, you can swap out the crypto suite centrally instead of editing each application manually.
- HSM and Software Readiness: Ensure that hardware modules, load balancers, and libraries support the new PQC algorithms. Some older HSMs cannot handle large key sizes or hybrid signatures. Vendors are already updating firmware under FIPS 140-3 validation, planning early avoids last-minute hardware refreshes.
- Test Environments and Dev Partnerships: Work with application teams to test PQC algorithms in staging. Identify dependencies on outdated OpenSSL versions, limited cipher suites, or embedded trust stores that could block migration.
How can Encryption Consulting Help?
Encryption Consulting has extensive experience delivering end-to-end PKI solutions for enterprise and government clients. We provide both professional services to ensure your PKI is secure, resilient, and future-ready.
PKI Assessment and Project Planning
We assess your current PKI/cryptographic environment, review PKI configurations, dependencies, and requirements, to identify gaps and consolidate findings into a structured, customer-approved project plan, ensuring alignment with best security practices.
CP/CPS Development
We develop Certificate Policy (CP) and Certification Practice Statement (CPS) aligned with RFC#3647. These documents are customized to align with your organization’s PKI strategy ensuring comprehensive documentation and compliance with legal, business, and security standards.
PKI Design and Implementation
We conduct stakeholder workshops to gather PKI requirements, assess existing capabilities, and pinpoint specific needs across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises systems. We provide a customized PKI architecture with Root and Issuing CAs, HSM integration, and deployment models that are in line with security, scalability, and compliance objectives.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
After implementation, we create and execute disaster recovery and business continuity plans, test failovers, and document operating procedures for the entire PKI and HSM infrastructure, supported by an extensive PKI operations manual.
Ongoing Support and Maintenance (Optional)
We provide a subscription-based annual support package that covers all PKI, CLM, and HSM components in detail after deployment. This covers patch management, CP/CPS updates, key archiving, incident response, troubleshooting, system optimization, audit logging, and certificate lifecycle management.
This approach ensures your PKI infrastructure is not only secure and compliant but also scalable, resilient, and fully aligned with your long-term operational and regulatory goals.
Conclusion
Digital trust is not a slogan or a slide. It is the daily practice of knowing which identities exist, how they are used, and whether the rules that protect them are working. PKI is the practical instrument for that work. If it is invisible and unmanaged, outages and audit findings are inevitable. If it is visible and governed, it becomes a strength that supports growth.
Control doesn’t begin with complex frameworks or expensive tools; it begins with awareness. It’s about knowing what exists across your environment, understanding how it behaves, and ensuring that automation supports people rather than replacing their judgment. When organizations let PKI handle repetitive and time-sensitive work, such as certificate renewals, policy enforcement, and monitoring, teams gain time to focus on oversight, governance, and forward planning. Building these habits gradually transforms PKI from a hidden dependency into a transparent system of trust that works quietly in the background yet strengthens every connection built on it.
