TL;DR: Akeyless says certificate lifecycle management is no longer just about renewals, but about unifying certificates, secrets, encryption keys, and just-in-time access into one identity security control plane for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. That shift turns CLM from a point capability into a broader governance problem across machine, human, and AI access paths.
At a glance
What this is: NHI Mgmt Group's analysis, drawing on Akeyless's blog post: Certificate lifecycle management is expanding into unified identity security by combining CLM, secrets, key management, and just-in-time access.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM and security teams increasingly have to govern machine trust as a single lifecycle problem rather than as separate certificate, secret, and key silos.
👉 Read Akeyless's analysis of certificate lifecycle management and unified identity security
Context
Certificate lifecycle management is the operational discipline of issuing, renewing, revoking, and monitoring digital certificates so systems can trust each other. In this article, Akeyless argues that CLM no longer works well as an isolated function because modern environments also depend on secrets, encryption keys, and just-in-time access.
The governance gap is fragmentation: certificates are often managed in one place while secrets and key material sit elsewhere, creating duplicated tooling, inconsistent policy, and harder audits. That is not just a tooling problem, it is an identity security problem because the same machine trust chain spans multiple control domains.
The article frames CLM as part of a broader identity security stack for machines, humans, and AI agents. That makes the topic relevant to IAM, NHI governance, and lifecycle control because the question becomes how to govern trust material across one operating model rather than several disconnected ones.
Key questions
Q: How should teams govern certificate lifecycle management in multi-cloud environments?
A: Teams should govern CLM as part of the broader machine identity stack, not as a standalone certificate tool. That means tying issuance, renewal, revocation, and discovery to secrets management, key protection, and audit evidence so identity state remains consistent across cloud platforms and workloads.
Q: Why do separate secrets, PAM, and certificate tools increase governance risk?
A: Because each tool can enforce a different lifecycle for the same trust boundary. That creates policy drift, extra handoffs, and partial audit evidence, especially when a secret, session, or certificate changes state in one system but not the others.
Q: What are the signs that CLM is too narrow for modern identity governance?
A: A CLM programme is too narrow when certificates are renewed on schedule but secrets, API keys, and encryption keys are owned elsewhere with different processes. Another sign is that audit evidence has to be assembled manually from multiple systems. That usually means the organisation is managing artifacts instead of governing the identity lifecycle.
Q: When should security teams evaluate zero-knowledge custody in identity platforms?
A: They should evaluate it whenever a SaaS platform handles high-value trust material such as certificates, secrets, or encryption keys. The key question is whether the provider can ever reconstruct full key material and what that means for custody, recovery, and compliance. If the answer is unclear, the trust model is not sufficiently defined.
Technical breakdown
Why certificate lifecycle management becomes a control-plane problem
Certificate lifecycle management stops being a narrow renewal task once certificates, secrets, key management, and access policies all affect the same trust chain. A control plane in this context is the layer that coordinates issuance, policy, and enforcement across identities and environments. If CLM sits apart from secrets and key workflows, teams end up duplicating policy logic and missing dependencies between authentication, storage, and revocation. In hybrid and multi-cloud estates, that separation creates governance drift because the certificate is only one artifact in a wider machine identity lifecycle.
Practical implication: Treat CLM as part of a broader machine identity operating model, not as a standalone renewal utility.
How unified secrets and key management change identity governance
Secrets management and encryption key management are the missing pieces in many certificate programmes because certificates alone do not secure runtime access. Secrets are the credentials and tokens that applications use to authenticate, while key management governs the lifecycle of cryptographic material that protects those assets. When those layers are handled separately, teams struggle to prove who can use what, where material is stored, and how access is revoked. A unified model reduces the number of handoffs and makes governance reviews more coherent across the full credential estate.
Practical implication: Map certificates, secrets, and keys to one ownership and review process so lifecycle controls are applied consistently.
Why zero-knowledge matters in SaaS-based identity security
Zero-knowledge architecture means the provider cannot fully see or reconstruct the customer’s sensitive material, which changes the trust model for cloud-delivered identity tooling. In practice, this is about reducing provider exposure to key material and limiting blast radius if the platform is compromised. The important governance point is not vendor branding, but custody boundaries: if a platform handles certificates, keys, and secrets, customers need to understand whether the operator can ever access the full trust material. That is especially relevant where regulatory expectations around controlled key custody are strict.
Practical implication: Validate custody, visibility, and recovery assumptions before moving certificate and secret control into a shared SaaS layer.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: Obtain trusted access by abusing fragmented machine identity controls rather than breaking the underlying cryptography itself.
- Entry occurs when organizations spread certificates, secrets, and keys across separate tools, creating inconsistent control points and weak visibility into the trust chain.
- Escalation happens when an attacker or insider can move from one unmanaged credential store to adjacent key or secret material because governance is fragmented.
- Impact follows when certificate misuse, leaked secrets, or exposed keys allow unauthorized access to systems that still appear trusted by downstream services.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Hugging Face Spaces breach 2024: Unauthorised access to Hugging Face Spaces may have exposed secrets users stored for AI apps; tokens were revoked and org tokens removed.
- CircleCI breach 2023: Malware stole a CircleCI engineer's SSO session; attackers exfiltrated customers' CI/CD secrets and keys, forcing a platform-wide rotation.
Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 150+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Unified identity security is becoming the practical endpoint for certificate lifecycle management: CLM no longer describes the full governance problem once secrets, encryption keys, and access policy all feed the same trust decision. Separate tools create separate failure domains, which is manageable only until teams need consistent lifecycle control across hybrid estates. The implication is that certificate programmes now have to be judged by how well they govern the wider machine identity stack, not just renewal automation.
Secret and key sprawl weakens certificate governance more than most teams admit: A certificate can be issued cleanly and still sit inside an environment where the surrounding secret handling is fragmented. That fragmentation turns renewal into a partial control because the credential ecosystem remains exposed even when the certificate itself is current. The practitioner conclusion is that lifecycle governance has to track the full credential estate, not just the visible certificate.
Zero-knowledge is a custody model, not a marketing detail: In a unified identity platform, the decisive question is whether the operator can ever see full key material or reconstruct customer trust assets. That assumption matters because key custody defines how much residual trust the customer is forced to place in the provider. The implication for security architects is to evaluate SaaS identity platforms by custody boundaries and recovery assumptions, not by feature count alone.
Unified control planes reduce operational friction but increase governance dependency: When CLM, secrets, and key management converge, the organisation gains coherence only if ownership, policy, and audit processes are equally unified. Without that, the platform becomes another place where lifecycle responsibilities blur across teams. The practitioner conclusion is to align operating model, not just tooling, before collapsing identity functions into one stack.
From our research library:
- Enterprises manage far more machine secrets than human ones: 20 times as many according to Enterprise Strategy Group, and 45 times according to GitGuardian.
- Read next: Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge
What this signals
Certificate lifecycle management is moving toward a broader identity control model: teams that still separate certificates from secrets and keys will keep paying a governance tax in duplicated policy, uneven revocation, and weak auditability. The pressure is not just operational, it is architectural, because the trust chain now spans every layer of the machine identity estate.
Fragmentation is the real control failure: according to the State of Secrets in AppSec, organisations maintain an average of 6 distinct secrets manager instances, creating fragmentation that undermines centralised control. That same pattern shows up in CLM when certificates, keys, and secrets are governed in different systems. The practical signal is clear: lifecycle governance is only as strong as the seams between tools.
Unified platforms will keep winning budget conversations when they reduce handoffs, but the governance test remains unchanged: the organisation still has to prove who owns issuance, rotation, custody, and revocation across the full trust chain. If those answers are spread across teams, the platform consolidation has solved the wrong problem.
For practitioners
- Define one machine identity ownership model Assign a single owner for certificates, secrets, and keys so lifecycle decisions are made against one inventory and one policy set rather than multiple tools.
- Inventory the full trust chain Map where certificates, API keys, secrets, and encryption keys live, who can rotate them, and which systems depend on each item at runtime.
- Review custody assumptions for SaaS identity platforms Verify whether the operator can access full key material, how recovery works, and what evidence exists for controlled custody in the platform architecture.
- Collapse duplicate lifecycle workflows Remove separate renewal, secret rotation, and key-handling processes that create inconsistent revocation and audit outcomes across the same environment.
Key takeaways
- Certificate lifecycle management now has to be judged as part of a wider machine identity governance model, not as a stand-alone renewal function.
- Fragmented handling of certificates, secrets, and keys creates avoidable control gaps, especially when teams cannot see the full trust chain in one inventory.
- The strongest test for modern identity platforms is whether they unify ownership, custody, and lifecycle evidence across all trust material.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and MITRE ATT&CK address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 — Secret Leakage | The article centres on secrets as part of the unified identity control plane. |
| NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | Unified control of certificates, keys, and access policies addresses excessive machine trust. | |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | The article’s lifecycle argument applies directly to stale credentials and keys. | |
| Recommendation — Scan for exposed secrets and treat secret leakage as part of the CLM governance scope. Review machine identities for excess access and align certificate governance with least-privilege scope. Reduce the lifetime of machine credentials and revoke stale secrets on a fixed lifecycle schedule. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | The article is about governing identity permissions across certificates, keys, and secrets. |
| Recommendation — Align entitlements for machine identities with one governed access model across tools. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Certificate, secret, and key lifecycle management map to authenticator lifecycle control. |
| Recommendation — Use IA-5 to govern issuance, rotation, and revocation for machine authenticators. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006;TA0008 — Credential Access; Lateral Movement | The article’s risk model is credential abuse across fragmented trust material. |
| Recommendation — Map fragmented credential handling to TA0006 and TA0008 to prioritize containment paths. | ||
Key terms
- Certificate Lifecycle Management: The governance of digital certificates from issuance through renewal and revocation, ensuring certificates are valid, monitored, and rotated before expiry. Expired certificates are a leading cause of outages and unplanned security gaps.
- Secrets Management: The discipline of securely storing, distributing, rotating, and auditing secrets across an organisation's systems and pipelines, typically implemented via a centralised secrets vault such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Akeyless.
- Zero-Knowledge Architecture: A design pattern in which the service provider cannot decrypt customer data because it never receives the keys needed to do so. The provider may store encrypted data and coordinate sync or processing, but it remains technically unable to read plaintext unless the architecture is broken.
- Machine Identity: The digital identity of a machine, device, or workload, such as a server, container, or VM, used to authenticate it within a network. Sometimes used interchangeably with NHI, though NHI is the broader category.
What's in the full article
Akeyless's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Side-by-side feature comparison between CLM-only and unified identity security approaches
- The vendor's description of built-in secrets management, key management, and ACME support
- Implementation claims around zero-knowledge architecture and distributed fragments cryptography
- The product table covering certificate types, provisioning, revocation, and pricing model
Deepen your knowledge
NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on June 24, 2026.
Updated on October 7, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org