Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) form the foundation of digital trust, enabling secure communication, strong authentication, and reliable data protection across modern enterprise environments.
As organisations shift toward cloud-native architectures, IoT ecosystems, and zero-trust security models, the scale and complexity of machine identities continue to grow exponentially. Combined with emerging challenges such as TLS 1.2 deprecation, certificate sprawl across containers and microservices, and new mandates for post-quantum cryptography (PQC), traditional certificate management approaches have become increasingly inefficient and risky. PKI and CLM modernisation is now a critical component of broader machine identity management — a strategic move we explore in the following sections.
Introduction: PKI and CLM Modernization
PKI modernisation focuses on upgrading the core security framework that uses cryptographic keys and digital certificates to authenticate identities, establish trust, and secure communications and data exchanges across the enterprise. Modern environments demand more flexible, automated, and cloud-aligned PKI architectures, which extend far beyond the capabilities of legacy Certificate Authorities (CAs).
Today, PKI modernisation often includes adopting modern CA models such as cloud-hosted private CAs in Azure AD, ACME-based automated certificate issuance, and the use of short-lived certificates to reduce reliance on long-term secrets and improve security posture. Modern PKI also depends heavily on hardware-backed trust anchors, requiring secure root CA hosting, FIPS-compliant HSMs, tamper-resistant key storage, and resilient signing workflows to maintain cryptographic integrity.
In addition, modern PKI design incorporates secure certificate signing workflows, delegated administration, and streamlined policy enforcement to align with cloud-native, DevOps, and zero-trust architectures. These enhancements ensure that PKI remains scalable, compliant, and secure in a world where the volume of machine identities continues to grow rapidly. To successfully modernise PKI, organisations should focus on several key aspects, including:
- Conducting a comprehensive discovery and inventory of all digital certificates in the enterprise helps to identify redundancies, inactive systems, and security gaps.
- Centralised governance and policy ensure consistent certificate issuance, usage, and compliance monitoring, even across complex organisational structures.
- Automation of the certificate lifecycle process of issuance, renewal, revocation, and key management helps in reducing manual errors and preventing service outages caused by expired or mismanaged certificates.
- Merging public and private PKI systems into unified platforms simplifies management, cuts costs and enhances security.
- Hardware security modules (HSMs) integration provides secure key generation and storage, with cloud and hybrid support to increase scalability and availability.
- Crypto-agility and future-proofing, including preparing PKI systems for emerging cryptographic standards like post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to defend against future quantum computing threats.
CLM modernisation goes hand in hand with PKI modernisation, as effective Certificate Lifecycle Management is essential for maintaining security, availability, and operational integrity across all digital identities.
As organisations scale into cloud, DevOps, and IoT ecosystems, the number of machine identities — workloads, containers, devices, services, APIs — grows exponentially. Traditional certificate processes cannot keep pace, resulting in unmanaged certificates, service outages, and compliance gaps. Modern CLM focuses on creating a unified, automated, and policy-driven certificate management framework that provides full visibility and control across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This includes automated discovery of every certificate in the environment, centralised policy enforcement, role-based ownership, and seamless integration with cloud-native platforms, load balancers, service meshes, DevOps pipelines, and private/public CAs.
A modern CLM program also emphasises real-time monitoring, continuous compliance, automated renewals, and secure deployment workflows, ensuring that certificates are always valid, properly configured, and aligned to organisational security standards. By eliminating manual processes and reducing human error, CLM modernisation strengthens an organisation’s machine identity posture and ensures smoother, more resilient operations. To achieve this, modern CLM programs typically include several key components such as:
- Automated discovery and real-time monitoring of certificates.
- Streamlined workflows for certificate provisioning, renewal, and revocation.
- Reducing risk by decommissioning unused or shadow certificates.
- Assigning ownership and accountability for certificates to appropriate teams.
- Enhancing compliance with regulatory requirements through consistent and auditable certificate policies.
Challenges of Traditional Certificate Management
Outdated certificate management practices introduce several operational, security, and compliance risks that hinder an organisation’s ability to support modern cloud-native and distributed environments. These challenges fall into five major categories:
1. Visibility Challenges
Traditional certificate management often lacks centralised visibility across distributed environments. Without a unified inventory, organisations struggle to track where certificates live, who owns them, when they expire, and how they are used.
This lack of visibility becomes especially problematic in highly dynamic environments such as Kubernetes, where certificates rotate every 30–90 days, and in cloud-native systems where new workloads spin up and down rapidly. As a result, organisations face a growing risk of unmanaged, shadow, or rogue certificates leading to outages or exposure.
2. Control Challenges
Legacy certificate management tools are not designed for modern architectures, resulting in limited control over certificate issuance, renewal policies, and governance.
Distributed teams, fragmented CA usage, and inconsistent policies make it difficult to enforce standardised practices across cloud, IoT, DevOps, and on-prem environments.
This lack of control leads to misconfigurations, policy violations, and operational inconsistencies that weaken the overall trust model.
3. Automation Challenges
Many enterprises still rely on manual certificate processes—emails, spreadsheets, ticketing queues, and ad hoc scripts.
These manual workflows cannot keep up with today’s scale or speed, particularly in environments where:
- Kubernetes and service meshes rotate certificates frequently.
- DevOps pipelines require rapid, automated certificate provisioning.
- Cloud autoscaling can create and destroy workloads faster than issuing certificates manually.
The mismatch between traditional certificate validity periods and highly ephemeral cloud workloads amplifies the risk of unexpected outages.
4. Security Challenges
Decentralised certificate management often results in insecure private key storage, inconsistent cryptographic controls, and gaps in certificate validation.
Keys stored on local servers, shared directories, or unmanaged devices are vulnerable to theft or misuse, potentially enabling impersonation or unauthorised access.
The absence of automated revocation workflows further increases the risk of compromised certificates persisting undetected.
5. Compliance Challenges
Mismanaged certificates frequently lead to expired or non-compliant configurations, causing service downtime, audit failures, or regulatory violations.
Without automated policy enforcement and real-time compliance monitoring, organisations struggle to meet standards around encryption strength, certificate validity, CA trust, and lifecycle documentation.
As environments grow more distributed, maintaining consistent compliance manually becomes nearly impossible.
Modernization Steps for PKI and CLM
The modernisation of PKI and CLM follows a series of steps to improve security, efficiency, governance, and automation across digital certificates and key management processes. Below is a detailed explanation of the main steps involved in modernising PKI and CLM:
PKI Modernisation Steps
PKI modernisation follows a structured progression that strengthens governance, enhances automation, increases security, and prepares organisations for future cryptographic and operational demands. The steps below reflect a modern, cloud-aligned PKI transformation approach.
Step 1: Discovery and Assessment
Begin by identifying and building a complete inventory of all PKI-related components—including CAs, issued certificates, key usage patterns, trust chains, signing workflows, and dependencies across the enterprise.
A modern assessment should also evaluate:
- Crypto-agility and PQC readiness, including algorithm agility, key lengths, and readiness for post-quantum standards.
- ACME protocol compatibility for automated certificate issuance across cloud and DevOps environments.
- Policy-as-code capabilities to support scalable, automated PKI governance.
- Logging and SIEM integration readiness to ensure PKI events can be monitored centrally in tools such as Splunk, Azure Sentinel, or Elastic.
This baseline assessment highlights security gaps, compliance risks, technical debt, and operational inefficiencies, helping determine what must be modernised first.
Step 2: Prioritise Use Cases
Identify and prioritise applications, services, and business processes that rely on PKI, including SSL/TLS, device authentication, workload identities, secure email, code signing, and document signing.
Critical and high-risk use cases (e.g., externally facing TLS endpoints, authentication services, or identity providers) should be modernised first to maximise security gains and reduce operational exposure.
Step 3: Centralise Governance and Policy Management
Establish centralised governance for certificate issuance, renewal, revocation, and key management.
This includes defining consistent policies for:
- Certificate validity periods
- Allowed CAs
- Cryptographic standards
- Approval workflows
- Identity validation rules
Modern PKI governance increasingly uses policy-as-code, enabling automation, versioning, and enforcement across cloud-native and DevOps environments.
This step eliminates fragmented policy enforcement typical of legacy PKI systems
Step 4: Consolidate Public and Private PKI
Merge and standardise certificate operations across public and private PKI infrastructures to simplify management and reduce inconsistency.
Modern consolidation should also include:
- Orchestration of private CAs (e.g., Microsoft ADCS, AWS PCA, Azure AD Private CA) and public CAs through a unified CLM platform.
- Integration of enterprise PKI with cloud-native trust services and identity platforms.
This enables consistent policy enforcement, reduces operational overhead, and improves scalability across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Step 5: Strengthen Security Controls
Enhance PKI security through:
- Strong authentication (MFA, privileged access controls) for administrators
- Secure key storage using FIPS-compliant HSMs or cloud HSMs
- Root and subordinate CA hardening
- Role-based access control and delegated administration
- Adoption of approved and quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms
Integrations with modern services—such as Azure Key Vault, AWS CloudHSM, and Google Cloud KMS—support secure key workflows in cloud-native ecosystems.
Step 6: Automate Certificate Management
Introduce automation for certificate issuance, renewal, deployment, validation, and revocation to minimise manual effort and prevent outages.
Modern automation should explicitly support:
- DevOps pipelines (CI/CD, GitOps workflows)
- Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- ACME-based automated issuance for Kubernetes clusters, service meshes, load balancers, and ephemeral workloads
- Dynamic autoscaling environments where certificates must be provisioned instantly
Automation ensures continuous compliance, improves uptime, and aligns PKI operations with modern development and infrastructure practices.
Step 7: Monitor and Optimise PKI Operations
Implement continuous monitoring of PKI usage, certificate metrics, signing operations, and compliance posture.
Modern PKI monitoring should include:
- Integration with SIEM and SOAR tools for alerting and incident response
- Analytics to detect anomalies in certificate usage patterns
- Performance optimisation across hybrid PKI infrastructures
- Monitoring integrations with AWS PCA, Azure Key Vault, ACME services, and cloud PKI logs
Ongoing monitoring ensures PKI remains scalable, secure, and aligned with evolving operational requirements.
Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) Modernisation Steps
Step 1: Certificate Discovery and Inventory
Automatically scan and build a complete, real-time inventory of all digital certificates deployed across networks, servers, devices, cloud workloads, and applications. A modern discovery process must account for today’s dynamic environments—where certificates may exist for only hours or days rather than traditional multi-month lifecycles.
In addition to identifying certificate metadata such as expiration dates, issuing CAs, certificate types, algorithms, and usage contexts, modern discovery should also support:
- Short-lived certificates used across Kubernetes, service meshes, and cloud-native workloads
- ACME-based renewal workflows, enabling automated issuance and rotation
- Integration with DevOps and IaC ecosystems, including CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes cert-manager
- Granular, auditable logging aligned with standards such as FIPS, NIST 800-57, and NIST 800-63, ensuring complete traceability for compliance
This enhanced discovery capability helps uncover unmanaged, shadow, or unknown certificates, reducing operational risk and laying the foundation for effective CLM modernisation.
Step 2: Issuance & Renewal Automation
Implement automated workflows for certificate issuance, renewal, and rotation to ensure consistency, security, and scalability across the enterprise. Automated issuance processes should incorporate embedded policy checks for identity validation, certificate type approval, and governance alignment—ensuring that all certificates meet organisational and regulatory requirements.
Modern issuance and renewal automation must also support:
- ACME-based workflows for cloud-native and DevOps environments
- Short-lived certificate issuance for Kubernetes, service meshes, and microservices
- Automated expiry monitoring with proactive renewal before validity lapses
- Seamless key rotation during renewal to strengthen cryptographic security
- Integration with CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, Ansible, and orchestration tools
By automating both issuance and renewal, organisations eliminate manual errors, avoid unexpected outages, and maintain continuous certificate hygiene across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Step 3: Certificate Deployment and Configuration
Automate secure deployment of certificates to the right servers, devices, or applications, including installing intermediate certificates and setting trust chains correctly. Proper deployment prevents outages and security gaps.
Step 4: Certificate Renewal and Rotation
Automate certificate expiry monitoring and renewal processes before validity lapses. Also, support key rotation during renewal to enhance security. This avoids downtime and mitigates risks from expired or weak certificates.
Step 5: Certificate Revocation Management
Automate certificate revocation to quickly retire compromised, expired, or unused certificates and notify relying parties to prevent misuse. This is critical to maintaining trust and security integrity.
Step 6: Certificate Retirement and Archiving
Securely retire and archive certificates once they are no longer active. Archived certificates should be retained for auditing and compliance purposes while minimising risk exposure.
Step 7: Continuous Monitoring and Compliance
Implement continuous health monitoring for certificates to track expiration, revocation status, and compliance with organisational policies and regulations. Integrate reporting and alerting to maintain certificate hygiene and prevent outages.
Step 8: Automation and Integration
Integrate CLM with broader IT and security infrastructure (e.g., IAM, network devices, cloud systems) and use extensive automation for lifecycle events to reduce overhead and human error.
Continuous Monitoring and Compliance
Continuous Monitoring and Compliance in PKI and CLM is a crucial ongoing process, helping to safeguard the health, security, and regulatory adherence of all digital certificates and PKI components in an enterprise environment.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring includes the automated surveillance of all certificates and PKI-related assets across the entire technology estate. This includes tracking certificate issuance, expiration dates, revocation status, key usages, and compliance with organisational security policies.
- Expiration Tracking: To prevent service disruptions or security lapses caused by expired certificates, early alerts warn administrators well before certificates expire, ensuring timely renewal.
- Revocation Status: Monitoring ensures that compromised certificates are recognised and handled appropriately by all relying systems to prevent unauthorised access or man-in-the-middle attacks.
- Usage and Anomaly Detection: Continuous analysis of certificate usage patterns helps to find irregularities such as unexpected certificates, unapproved usage, or unusual key parameters, signalling potential security threats or policy violations.
- Compliance Checks: To maintain a strong security posture, continuous verification against industry and organisational standards is essential—covering key length, algorithm strength, certificate transparency, and lifecycle policies.
Modern environments also require compliance monitoring for MQTT-based IoT device certificates, which are widely used across distributed sensor and telemetry networks. Effective compliance programs should support both agent-based and agentless scanning to accommodate diverse device types, cloud workloads, and on-premises systems.
Additionally, integrating certificate compliance data into SIEM and SOAR platforms such as Splunk and Microsoft Sentinel enables real-time alerting, automated response workflows, and improved audit readiness.
Compliance
Compliance makes sure that all PKI and certificate lifecycle activities satisfy relevant legal, regulatory, and corporate security requirements, which is maintained through regular checks, reporting, and audit trails.
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Policy Enforcement: Automated policy enforcement ensures that every certificate issued or renewed aligns with predefined security standards—including approved Certificate Authorities, key types, and validity periods. Modern CLM systems can also detect and block common policy violations, such as:
- RSA keys smaller than 2048 bits
- Deprecated algorithms like SHA-1
- Certificates with excessively long validity periods
- Missing Subject Alternative Names (SAN), causing TLS handshake failures
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Reporting and Auditing: Comprehensive, real-time reports provide visibility into certificate status, compliance metrics, and incidents. Auditable logs of all certificate lifecycle events support internal and external compliance audits.
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Regulatory Adherence: Compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and industry best practices by making sure that proper certificate management controls are consistently applied.
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Risk Mitigation: Organisations minimise risk exposure from expired, misconfigured, or unauthorised certificates by maintaining compliance continuously and demonstrating commitment to cybersecurity governance.
How Encryption Consulting can Help Modernise Your PKI and CLM
Modernising PKI and CLM is not just a technical upgrade — it is a strategic transformation that strengthens your organisation’s digital trust, security posture, and operational resilience. Encryption Consulting helps enterprises achieve this through end-to-end advisory, robust managed services, and proven automation platforms.
Modernise Certificate Lifecycle Management With Certsecure Manager
Our CertSecure Manager is a fully automated, enterprise-grade CLM solution that eliminates the challenges of manual certificate management.
With CertSecure Manager, organisations gain:
- Complete certificate discovery across on-prem, cloud, DevOps, and hybrid environments
- End-to-end automation for issuance, renewal, deployment, and revocation
- Centralised governance and policy control to eliminate inconsistencies and human error
- Role-based access and delegated ownership for better accountability
- Seamless integrations with cloud platforms, ITSM tools, DevOps workflows, HSMs, and private/public CAs
- Native ACME protocol support, enabling automated issuance for Kubernetes, service meshes, and short-lived certificate workflows
- REST API integrations and DevOps pipeline support for CI/CD tools, Terraform, Ansible, and GitOps-based automation
- Real-time monitoring and alerting to prevent outages and maintain compliance
CertSecure Manager helps organisations establish a fully unified and automated CLM environment that reduces operational overhead, improves security, and supports crypto-agility.
Transform Your PKI with PKI-as-a-Service (PKIaaS)
Our PKI-as-a-Service offering enables organisations to modernise their PKI without the complexity of building, maintaining, and securing it internally.
With PKIaaS, enterprises benefit from:
- A fully managed, highly available PKI infrastructure with built-in redundancy
- Secure key generation and storage using FIPS-compliant HSMs
- Scalable architecture that supports cloud workloads, IoT, microservices, and hybrid environments
- Standardised and automated certificate policies to remove fragmentation
- Crypto-agility and readiness for post-quantum cryptography
- Regular monitoring, audits, and maintenance are performed by PKI experts.
This service helps organisations quickly adopt a modern, secure, and compliant PKI foundation—without the need for deep in-house PKI expertise.
Conclusion
Modernising PKI and CLM is essential for strengthening digital trust and keeping up with the growing complexity and demands of modern security environments. By adopting automation, centralised governance, and modern security controls, organisations can reduce risk, prevent outages, and ensure long-term resilience.
Looking ahead, emerging mandates such as NSA’s CNSA 2.0 requirements, the phased PQC migration guidance from NIST, and upcoming industry timelines for post-quantum algorithm adoption will require enterprises to maintain crypto-agile, future-ready PKI infrastructures.
A modernised PKI and CLM foundation not only enhances security and compliance today but also positions organisations to meet these future cryptographic and regulatory obligations—supporting scalable, agile growth across the enterprise.
