Scaling your certificate lifecycle operations with the power of automation 

Introduction 

A single certificate expiry was enough to shut down Microsoft 365 for several hours, affecting millions of users around the world. Not long after, SpaceX’s Starlink internet service also went down globally, all because someone forgot to renew a certificate. These are not isolated blunders, they are cautionary tales that highlight how a tiny lapse in certificate management can cripple even the most advanced tech ecosystems. 

In 2024, enterprises are managing nearly 20 times more machine identities than human ones. These machine identities power everything from IoT devices and cloud workloads to APIs, bots, and containers. Each one needs a digital certificate to function securely, but every new identity is also a new potential point of failure. As businesses scale, so does the risk, because in a world run by machines, one forgotten certificate can bring entire systems to a halt. 

Static approval chains, long-lived certificates, and siloed ownership models no longer work in a world where services spin up and down in seconds and digital trust needs continuous validation.  

Behind the scenes, engineers are wrestles with fragmented tools, developers often skip the process of proper certificate validation and use self-signed certificates to save time, and proper oversight gets lost in the rush to launch things quickly. But it doesn’t have to be this way. A modern Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) system, done right, offers speed without compromise, security without roadblocks, and governance without gridlock.  

Before we dive into solutions, it’s important to first understand the core of the problem. Below are the four biggest challenges organizations face today in managing digital certificates, and the real-world consequences that come with them. 

Why Traditional CLM Methods Are No Longer Sustainable 

Here’s a complete guide to break down the top challenges in certificate management and understand why they happen, what risks they bring, and how organizations can overcome them with the right solution. 

Certificate Sprawl Is Out of Control 

The number of digital certificates used across enterprise environments is exploding. From securing APIs and internal services to enabling encrypted communications between containers and workloads, certificates are now everywhere. Managing them manually has become an overwhelming task. 

Why it’s happening?

• Microservices and APIs need separate certificates for encrypted service-to-service communication. 
• Infrastructure-as-Code and dynamic scaling create workloads on the fly, each needing its own certificate. 
• Kubernetes-based environments are highly short-lived, requiring frequent certificate rotation. 
• Zero Trust models demand encryption across all internal systems too, not just public-facing services. 
• Compliance and crypto-agility mandates (e.g., shorter validity and PQC readiness) are shrinking certificate lifespans to 90 days or less. 

Result

• Certificate volume has increased by 4 to 12 times compared to traditional environments. 
• Manual certificate management using spreadsheets, calendar reminders, or ad hoc tracking can’t keep up. 
• Missed renewals lead to outages, service disruptions, and non-compliance with industry regulations. 
• Teams spend significant time firefighting expired certificates rather than focusing on innovation. 

Solution

Organizations must adopt an automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution. Automation ensures: 

• Certificates are issued, rotated, and renewed without human intervention. 
• Workflows are event-driven, triggered by pipeline deployments or infrastructure changes. 
• Certificates to scale sustainably with dynamic environments, ensuring coverage is always fast, consistent, and secure. 

Fragmented Certificate Ownership Across Teams 

Managing certificates is no longer the job of just one team. Almost every department, including DevOps, networking, application teams, and even IT support, uses certificates for different purposes. However, they often work in silos, with no shared strategy or visibility. 

Why it’s happening? 

• Multiple departments or team within organizations require certificates for vaurios use cases, such as Networking teams require certificates for SSL offloading,
• VPNs, and firewalls, DevOps teams need certificates for service-to-service APIs and containers, Application teams secure portals and data transfers with certificates. 
• These teams often use separate tools, follow different workflows, and make certificate decisions independently. 
• There’s no unified platform, policy, or approval flow to govern how certificates are requested, issued, or managed. 

Result

• Inconsistent practices, missed renewals, and shadow issuance where certificates issued outside security oversight. 
• Certificate-related incidents, like misconfigurations or expirations occur because ownership isn’t clearly defined. 
• In the event of a failure, it’s unclear who is responsible, delaying response and remediation. 
• Misconfigured or expired certificates can cause downtime, security breaches, and blame confusion. 
• Governance becomes weak, and incidents are harder to trace and fix. 

Solution

Automation brings consistency and control across teams without slowing down the operations or services: 

• Self-service portals and API integrations allow each team to request certificates within their own workflows, without bypassing governance. 
• Centralized policy templates define everything from key strength to validity, CA, and approval rules, ensuring certificates are consistent and secure. 
• Role-based access control (RBAC) ensures that each certificate is tied to a specific team, owner, or system. 

Lack of Visibility leads to Certificate Blind Spots

Organizations are not readily adopting single pane of glass view for their certificate lifecycle management. Certificates get issued and deployed, but no one tracks them. Over time, they’re forgotten, left to expire, or misconfigured, resulting in operational and security risks. 

Why it’s happening?

• Certificates are issued by multiple certificate authorities (CAs), both internal and external, with no central logging or unified record of issuance and deployment. 
• Teams deploy certificates across cloud providers, on-premise systems, endpoints, and third-party services, all using their own processes. 
• Most organizations still depend on manual tracking methods like spreadsheets, SharePoint lists, or shell script which is unreliable and hard to maintain. 
• There is no structured certificate inventory, nor any logging to show when a certificate was issued, where it was installed, or when it was last renewed or revoked. 

Result

• Certificates go unmonitored, expire without warning, or exist in unknown locations, increasing the risk of outages and compliance violations. 
• During incidents, security teams struggle to trace back activity, causing delays in containment and response. 
• Orphaned and unused certificates remain active, creating a larger attack surface. 
• Lack of logging makes it impossible to perform effective audits or enforce policy.

Solution

• Every certificate event, such as issuance, renewal, deployment, revocation should be automatically logged and timestamped. 
• Certificates are discovered, catalogued, and indexed from all sources, including public CAs, internal CAs, and third-party tools. 
• Logs feed into dashboards, reports, and SIEM integrations for compliance, auditing, and incident response. 
• This replaces error-prone spreadsheets with automated, reliable, and searchable logs, making visibility and accountability effortless. 

Manual Workflows Can’t Keep Up with Crypto Agility 

Legacy certificate workflows depend on tickets, email approvals, and manual installations. While this might have worked in the past, it’s far too slow and inefficient for today’s agile development environments, where code is deployed multiple times a day and infrastructure scales dynamically. 

Why it’s happening?

• Existing PKI and security teams are overwhelmed with growing volumes of certificate requests across environments (dev, staging, production). 
• Developers and operations teams can’t wait days for manual approvals, they need certificates in seconds to maintain release velocity. 
• To avoid delays, some teams take shortcuts, reusing old certificates, or worse, generating self-signed certificates that bypass security controls. 

Result

• Deployment is delayed by slow issuance processes, introducing friction into development pipelines. 
• Manual errors, such as incorrect key sizes, wrong CA usage, or missed installations, lead to service outages and increased risk. 
• The central PKI team becomes a bottleneck, reducing overall agility and creating frustration across the organization. 

Solution

• Certificates are issued automatically via API calls, CI/CD pipeline integrations, or event-based triggers when new services spin up. 
• Pre-approved templates enforce rules around key strength, certificate authority, validity period, and whether approval is required. 
• Ensure that higher-risk certificates still follow automated approval chains and the supply in request should be disabled within the certificate template, making sure that PKI environment is not ESC-1 vulnerable. 

Instead of manually hunting through fragmented systems to locate expired, unused, or misconfigured certificates, teams gain a real-time, centralized, and searchable view of their entire certificate lifecycle management environment. This improves visibility and changes how organizations manage machine identities, making the process more proactive, organized, and scalable. 

Introducing One-Stop Solution for Certificate Lifecycle Management- CertSecure Manager 

CertSecure Manager brings all your certificate needs into one unified platform, making lifecycle management simple, fast, and secure. With features like one-click certificate issuance and renewal, automated CA migrations, and centralized visibility, it eliminates the manual effort, delays, and risks that come with fragmented certificate operations. Whether you aree managing thousands of internal TLS certificates or preparing for crypto-agility and CA shifts, CertSecure Manager keeps your environment compliant, resilient, and fully automated. 

Here’s how the key challenges you’ve identified are directly addressed by the features of CertSecure Manager: 

Conclusion 

Managing digital certificates manually is not just inefficient, it is indeed risky. With microservices, containers, and short-lived certificates becoming the norm, the traditional methods of tracking certificates via spreadsheets and ticket-based workflows simply can not keep up. The result is missed renewals, unexpected outages, and security gaps that no organization can afford. 

But certificate management doesn’t have to be a burden. With CertSecure Manager, it becomes a strategic advantage. Whether you’re a DevOps engineer embedding certificates into CI/CD pipelines, a network administrator managing TLS across thousands of endpoints, or a security leader ensuring compliance across your infrastructure—this platform empowers your team with one-click automation, policy-based issuance, and real-time visibility across your entire certificate landscape. 

If you want to avoid outages, move faster, and automate how you manage certificates, a self-service CLM platform like CertSecure Manager isn’t just a nice-to-have. It is a need-to-have.