TL;DR: A Forrester Total Economic Impact study cited by Keyfactor found that a composite organisation achieved payback in less than six months and completed deployment in about four months, with Year 1 benefits of $4.25 million against roughly $1.3 million in costs. The operational lesson is that certificate automation changes risk and resource planning faster than many PKI programmes assume.
At a glance
What this is: This is a PKI modernization guide arguing that phased certificate automation can be deployed in months and can return value before the first renewal cycle.
Why it matters: It matters because certificate lifecycle delays drive outage risk, staffing pressure, and technical debt for teams responsible for NHI, workload identity, and related IAM controls.
Context
PKI modernization is the process of replacing manual certificate operations with automated issuance, renewal, visibility, and lifecycle control. In practice, the article argues that the hard part is not the cryptography itself but the operating model built around aging certificate authorities, slow change windows, and manual renewal workflows.
For IAM and NHI teams, that matters because certificates are not static infrastructure assets. They are living credentials that support workloads, services, and trust chains, so a slow rollout leaves both security risk and operational drag in place longer than many programmes assume.
Key questions
Q: How should teams phase PKI modernization without a rip-and-replace cutover?
A: Start by automating the certificates with the nearest renewal dates, keep existing certificate authorities running during transition, and expand coverage incrementally. That approach lowers outage risk, preserves roots of trust, and lets teams prove value before the entire estate is migrated.
Q: Why do unmanaged certificates create more than an outage risk?
A: Because a certificate is tied to a private key that proves identity, unmanaged certificates can enable impersonation, decryption, or fraudulent trust relationships. The problem is not only expiry or service disruption. It is that stale or exposed trust material can let an attacker present themselves as a legitimate system or service.
Q: What signs show that PKI modernization is not reducing operational load?
A: If renewal work, incident response, and certificate tracking still consume most PKI engineering time, the programme has not yet shifted the control point. Effective automation should reduce repetitive renewal effort, improve visibility, and free staff for higher-value governance tasks.
Q: Should organisations keep legacy certificate authorities running during migration?
A: Yes, when the existing trust fabric supports live production systems. Keeping legacy certificate authorities in place during phased migration avoids a risky big-bang cutover, lets teams grandfather roots of trust into the new model, and reduces the chance of accidental service breakage.
Technical breakdown
Phased PKI deployment and certificate lifecycle automation
A phased PKI deployment modernises certificate operations without forcing a rip-and-replace cutover. The article describes a model where existing certificate authorities continue operating while new automation handles issuance, renewal, visibility, and migration in stages. That matters because certificate lifecycle automation changes the control plane first, then expands coverage. In NHI terms, the move is from manual, per-system handling to centrally governed credential lifecycle management across the certificate estate.
Practical implication: stage automation around the highest-risk certificate flows first, then expand coverage while legacy PKI stays in service.
Why certificate renewal failures create operational outages
Certificates fail differently from passwords because their expiration is deterministic and often invisible until something breaks. When renewal is manual, the failure mode is not just compromise but avoidable outage, because an expired certificate can interrupt authentication, service-to-service communication, and application availability. The article’s core point is that automation reduces this exposure quickly by removing human timing errors from the renewal path. That is especially relevant for NHI governance, where the credential may be embedded in infrastructure owners do not watch daily.
Practical implication: identify certificates with near-term expiry and automate those renewals before they become outage events.
PKI resource planning and certificate estate growth
The article frames PKI modernization as a staffing and scale problem as much as a security one. Manual operations do not scale linearly with a growing certificate estate, so every additional certificate increases tracking, renewal, and incident workload unless automation absorbs it. That is why the study’s resource model matters: implementation effort is concentrated up front, while ongoing administration drops once automation is in place. For identity teams, the deeper lesson is that certificate governance must be treated as a lifecycle programme, not a one-time migration.
Practical implication: budget implementation and steady-state operations separately, and tie staffing assumptions to certificate growth, not historic manual effort.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The practical objective is not theft but disruption, by exploiting renewal failure and the trust dependency that expired certificates create.
- Entry occurs when a manually managed certificate reaches expiry or is missed in a renewal queue, creating an avoidable service interruption.
- Escalation follows when that certificate sits inside authentication or service-to-service trust paths, so one missed renewal can affect multiple dependent systems.
- Impact is operational disruption, lost engineering time, and recurring outage risk that persists until certificate lifecycle handling is automated.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Sisense breach 2024: A credential in Sisense's GitLab reportedly opened S3 buckets of customer tokens, passwords and certificates; CISA urged a full reset.
Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 200+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Fast PKI modernization is really a certificate lifecycle governance problem, not a tooling swap. The article’s central claim is that organisations can reduce certificate risk in months because the bottleneck is workflow design, not cryptographic complexity. That aligns with OWASP-NHI and NIST key management thinking: the control surface is issuance, renewal, visibility, and revocation across the certificate estate. Practitioners should treat PKI as an identity lifecycle programme with measurable operational outcomes, not as a multi-year infrastructure rewrite.
Manual certificate operations create a renewal-risk window that is smaller than many governance teams assume. The article shows that value begins as soon as the first certificates are automated, which means the risk reduction curve starts well before full migration. That is important because the most expensive outages are often caused by the certificates closest to expiry, not the largest ones. The practitioner conclusion is clear: prioritise the credentials most likely to fail soonest, not the systems easiest to modernise.
Phased migration is the only realistic model for enterprises with existing roots of trust. The article’s grandfathered transition approach reflects a broader truth across human, NHI, and workload identity: trust anchors are operational dependencies, not disposable components. Replacing them abruptly would create more risk than it removes, which is why coexistence and staged onboarding matter. Security teams should expect modernisation to be cumulative, with governance tightening as coverage grows rather than after a final cutover.
Certificate automation changes the economics of identity security by turning manual overhead into recoverable capacity. The study data cited by Keyfactor points to a programme that pays back before the first renewal cycle, which means operational debt is being burned down while risk is being reduced. That is not just a finance story. It signals that identity programmes which still rely on human renewal handling are carrying hidden labour and outage costs that compound as the estate grows.
PKI modernization should be framed as identity resilience for machine trust, not just certificate management. Certificates are the trust fabric for workloads, APIs, and internal systems, so slow renewal and poor visibility have direct identity consequences. The article reinforces a broader NHI governance lesson: if the credential is machine-readable and machine-consumed, the lifecycle has to be automated at machine speed. Practitioners should align certificate programmes with machine identity governance, not keep them as a separate infrastructure task.
From our research library:
- According to the 2023 State of Machine Identity Management report, only 47% of companies have enough staff dedicated to their PKI.
What this signals
Certificate modernisation is now a lifecycle governance issue, not a capital project. The article shows that the control value appears early, which means teams do not need to wait for a final migration milestone before seeing risk reduction. For NHI programmes, that shifts the conversation from platform replacement to renewal automation, visibility, and steady-state governance.
The broader signal is that machine trust is becoming operationally measurable in shorter cycles. Once certificate renewal is automated, the remaining work is about coverage expansion, trust-anchor coexistence, and reducing manual exception handling across the estate.
For practitioners
- Prioritise near-term certificate renewals Start with manually managed certificates that are closest to expiry, because they carry the highest outage risk and produce the fastest measurable return from automation.
- Run phased migration alongside legacy CAs Keep existing certificate authorities in service while onboarding new automation, so teams can move roots of trust gradually instead of attempting a disruptive cutover.
- Separate implementation effort from steady-state operations Plan for concentrated deployment resources during the migration window, then recalibrate ongoing staffing for expanded visibility, onboarding, and retirement of legacy workflows.
- Treat certificate lifecycle as an identity programme Govern issuance, renewal, revocation, and visibility as part of NHI lifecycle management for workloads and internal services, not as isolated infrastructure chores.
Key takeaways
- Manual certificate handling creates avoidable outage risk because renewal is a deterministic lifecycle event that humans are poor at scaling.
- The article’s cited study shows that PKI modernization can start paying back within months, which changes how teams should sequence their investments.
- The strongest control shift is moving certificate renewal and visibility into an automated lifecycle model before legacy trust failures become routine.
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 SP 800-53 Rev 5 and CSA Cloud Controls Matrix set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | The article centres on reducing the risk of long-lived certificate handling and missed renewals. |
| NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | Phased migration and grandfathered trust anchors raise lifecycle-offboarding concerns for old certificate paths. | |
| Recommendation — Automate certificate renewal before expiry windows create operational and security exposure. Retire legacy certificate paths in a controlled sequence and revoke obsolete trust relationships. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Certificate lifecycle automation is directly governed by authenticator management controls. |
| Recommendation — Apply IA-5 to enforce issuance, renewal, and revocation governance for machine certificates. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006;TA0040 — Credential Access; Impact | Expired or mishandled certificates can enable credential-dependent disruption and operational impact. |
| Recommendation — Map certificate renewal failures to credential access and impact scenarios in detection and resilience planning. | ||
| CSA Cloud Controls Matrix | IAM — Identity and Access Management | Cloud certificate governance and lifecycle visibility are central to identity and access management in hybrid environments. |
| Recommendation — Extend IAM governance to certificate issuance, rotation, and revocation across hybrid estates. | ||
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.
- Phased PKI Migration: Phased PKI migration is the gradual transition from legacy certificate authorities and manual workflows to modernised certificate governance. It preserves live trust paths during change, which is critical when roots of trust cannot be replaced safely in a single cutover.
- Machine Trust Chain: The linked set of credentials, APIs, services and permissions that allows an automated system or AI agent to operate. If any part of that chain is overbroad or hidden, compromise can propagate quickly because the surrounding controls assume the chain is trustworthy.
- Renewal Risk: The possibility that contract timing, pricing changes, or staggered subscription dates will reduce bargaining power and force unwanted continuation of a service. For identity teams, renewal risk is a lifecycle issue because it can keep unnecessary access and dependency alive longer than intended.
Deepen your knowledge
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Published by the NHIMG editorial team on July 1, 2026.
Updated on October 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org