A single expired certificate can be enough to cause significant damage for months without anyone noticing. That is what happened to the US financial services company Equifax in 2017: an attack went undetected for 76 days because an expired certificate impaired the monitoring of network traffic. During this time, attackers were able to extract data belonging to around 147 million people.
This example shows that an expired certificate is rarely just a technical detail. It can prevent monitoring, bring applications to a standstill, and facilitate security incidents. That is precisely why certificate management should be on the agenda of IT and security decision-makers today.
Key Takeaways
Shorter certificate lifetimes are increasingly turning manual processes into an operational risk.
Professional certificate management provides transparency, automates renewals, and reduces outages.
A vendor-independent strategy combines PKI, Certificate Lifecycle Management, and the existing IAM environment.
What Is Certificate Management?
Certificate management encompasses the discovery, issuance, monitoring, renewal, and revocation of digital certificates throughout their entire lifecycle. The goal is to manage certificates reliably and thereby ensure secure authentication and the stable operation of people, machines, APIs, and devices.
Why Certificate Management Is Becoming Increasingly Important
The pressure to act is growing, primarily due to the increasingly shorter validity periods of publicly trusted TLS certificates. The CA/Browser Forum has therefore decided on a phased reduction: since March 15, 2026, the maximum validity period has been 200 days; from March 2027, it will be 100 days; and from March 2029, it will be just 47 days.
The rationale is understandable: the longer a certificate remains valid, the longer a compromised or outdated certificate can pose a security risk. Shorter validity periods reduce this window of opportunity while also ensuring that the information stored in certificates remains more up to date.
For companies, however, this also means that certificates will have to be replaced much more frequently in the future. While a few certificates can still be managed using an Excel spreadsheet and calendar reminders, handling hundreds or thousands of certificates quickly becomes unmanageable.
Certificate Management and PKI: Key Terms Explained
For effective PKI certificate management, it is important to distinguish between several key concepts:
- Public Key Infrastructure (PKI): A combination of roles, policies, processes, and technologies used to issue and manage digital certificates.
- Certificate Authority (CA): A trusted entity that issues certificates and validates the identity they attest to.
- Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM): The systematic management of a certificate from discovery and issuance through monitoring and renewal to revocation.
- SSL/TLS Certificates: The best-known application on the web, but far from the only one. Certificates are also used for VPNs, APIs, IoT, and mTLS.
Professional certificate management therefore does not focus solely on individual SSL/TLS certificates. Instead, it considers the entire lifecycle and all relevant areas of use.
Typical Risks of Inadequate Certificate Management
Without a central overview, operational and security-related risks can quickly arise. Real-world examples demonstrate how far-reaching the consequences can be:
- Operational disruptions: In 2024, an expired certificate caused a 91-minute outage of the Bank of England’s CHAPS payment system. Microsoft Teams was also unavailable for around three hours in 2020 for 20 million users, likewise due to an expired certificate.
- Shadow PKI: Individual teams or applications issue certificates without central control. This leaves security teams without the necessary visibility.
- Security risks: Compromised, incorrectly issued, or expired certificates may remain undetected and impair security controls.
- Compliance gaps: Without traceable processes, responsibilities, and audit trails, providing evidence to internal audit and compliance teams becomes unnecessarily complex.
From Excel Spreadsheets to Automated Certificate Management
In many companies, certificate management still begins with spreadsheets, email reminders, and manual checks. According to a SwissSign survey of larger organizations, 74 percent of the companies surveyed had already experienced service outages caused by expired certificates within the previous five years.
Automated Certificate Lifecycle Management addresses precisely these challenges. A suitable solution creates a central inventory, monitors certificate lifetimes, automates renewals, and integrates with existing systems such as Active Directory, cloud platforms, or IT service management solutions.
Certificates used for machines, applications, and services deserve particular attention when it comes to non-human identities. As companies increasingly automate processes and adopt cloud-based services, the number of digital identities that must be securely managed without manual intervention continues to grow.
Certificate Management as Part of a Holistic IAM Strategy
Certificates are an important component of an organization’s technical identities. Certificate management software used in isolation can therefore only solve part of the problem. What matters is how certificates are integrated into existing IAM, security, and governance processes.
This is particularly important for companies with complex IT environments, where certificates, identities, applications, and access rights all need to work together.
Automated certificate management should therefore not be viewed as a standalone solution, but rather as a building block of a holistic security architecture.
You can learn more about these topics in our articles on IAM solutions and their business value, Zero Trust Security and ITDR & Zero Trust.
How OEDIV SecuSys Supports You with Certificate Management
OEDIV SecuSys supports companies in strategically establishing and sustainably automating their certificate management — independently of vendors and focused on practical solutions.
The process starts with a structured assessment of your existing environment: Which certificates are currently in use? Where are the dependencies? Which processes are still manual? And what requirements arise from your existing IAM, security, and compliance environment?
Based on this assessment, we support you in selecting and implementing a suitable CLM solution. The focus is not on the product itself, but on finding the solution that best fits your IT environment, processes, and requirements. If desired, OEDIV SecuSys can also support you with long-term operations.
Would you like to know how well your certificate management is prepared for the upcoming reductions in certificate validity periods?
Talk to our experts about your current situation and potential steps toward automation.
Conclusion: Certificate Management Is Not an Excel Task
As certificate validity periods become shorter, the effort required for manual processes increases significantly. At the same time, IT environments, cloud adoption, and the number of machine and service identities continue to grow. Professional certificate management is therefore becoming a business-critical discipline.
Automated certificate management creates transparency, reduces operational risks, and takes the pressure off IT and security teams. The key question is not which tool offers the most features, but which solution can be meaningfully integrated into your existing environment.
OEDIV SecuSys supports you independently of vendors — from analysis and implementation through to long-term operations.
If you want to move your certificate management from the world of Excel spreadsheets to an automated, reliable process, get in touch with us.