TL;DR: Enterprises now manage an average of more than 114,000 internal certificates while dedicating only four full-time staff to PKI, and 56% report downtime from expired or misconfigured certificates, according to CyberArk citing Ponemon Institute research. The underlying problem is not just operational strain but identity governance drift, where certificate sprawl outpaces visibility, ownership, and automation.
At a glance
What this is: This is an analysis of how certificate sprawl, understaffing, and shrinking certificate lifecycles turn PKI failures into machine identity governance problems.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and NHI teams increasingly own the operational risk behind certificates, not just the infrastructure they secure.
Context
PKI is the certificate and trust layer that lets machines, applications, and devices authenticate and communicate securely. In this article, CyberArk frames certificate failures as an identity governance issue because internal certificates now secure workloads, devices, cloud services, and machine-to-machine communications at a scale that manual ownership cannot keep up with.
The key problem is not simply that certificates expire. It is that certificate ownership, visibility, and renewal discipline have drifted away from the actual blast radius of modern infrastructure, where private certificate authorities and internal issuance now carry operational and security consequences across hybrid environments.
That makes this a machine identity story as much as a PKI story. When the certificate estate becomes too large and too fragmented to govern, outages and compromise are symptoms of a broader lifecycle failure rather than isolated IT hygiene lapses.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when certificate ownership is split across many teams?
A: Visibility breaks first, then accountability, then renewal discipline. When DevOps, app teams, cloud teams, and security teams each control part of the lifecycle, no one can reliably answer which certificates exist, who owns them, or which services will fail if they expire. That fragmentation creates avoidable trust outages.
Q: Why do expired certificates still cause outages in mature environments?
A: Expired certificates still cause outages because many environments rely on manual tracking, fragmented ownership, and renewal processes that do not match certificate growth. Mature teams often have policy, but not reliable execution. When the inventory is incomplete or the owner is unclear, the renewal event is missed and the service fails before remediation begins.
Q: How should teams decide whether PKI needs modernization?
A: Teams should modernize PKI when certificate volume, renewal frequency, or hybrid complexity outgrows the current operating model. If the organization cannot reliably inventory certificates, enforce policy, and renew without manual intervention, the PKI is already operating beyond its safe governance capacity. Modernization should be driven by continuity risk, not by technology refresh cycles.
Q: What is the difference between certificate expiry and certificate compromise?
A: Certificate expiry is a control lapse that usually disrupts availability, while compromise means the private key or certificate trust has been exposed and can be abused for impersonation or interception. Both are identity problems, but compromise carries a much higher security consequence because trust can be used by an attacker before anyone notices.
Technical breakdown
Why certificate sprawl breaks PKI governance
Certificate sprawl means the number of active certificates, issuers, and renewal points grows faster than the processes used to track them. In modern environments, internally issued certificates secure workloads, devices, and service-to-service traffic across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid estates. That makes PKI an identity system for machines, not just a cryptographic utility. When ownership is fragmented and inventory is incomplete, teams lose the ability to answer basic questions about where trust exists, who manages it, and which certificates are nearing failure. The result is operational drift that can mask both outages and attack exposure.
Practical implication: build a complete certificate inventory with clear ownership before you can govern renewal, rotation, and revocation.
How weak key management turns into security incidents
A certificate is only as trustworthy as the private key behind it and the policy around its use. When keys are weakly protected, poorly managed, or reused across systems, compromise can lead to impersonation, interception, and unauthorized access. That is why PKI failures are often identity failures in disguise: the trust chain may still validate technically while the underlying credentials have already been exposed or abused. The article’s point is not that cryptography stopped working, but that lifecycle controls around keys and certificates are no longer keeping pace with the environments they protect.
Practical implication: treat key protection and certificate governance as one lifecycle, not separate operational tasks.
Why certificate outages are a governance symptom, not the root cause
Expired or misconfigured certificates usually surface as downtime, but the outage is the end result of deeper control breakdowns. Manual tracking, ad hoc renewals, and inconsistent policy enforcement create a fragile operating model that does not scale as certificate lifetimes shrink. In that environment, every renewal becomes a potential service interruption, especially when dependencies are spread across multiple teams or external providers. The technical issue is not just expiry. It is that the governance model cannot reliably maintain trust continuity at machine scale.
Practical implication: automate renewal and enforcement workflows before short-lived certificates become a recurring service risk.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker seeks to turn trusted machine identity material into impersonation, interception, or unauthorized access that can be used at scale.
- Entry occurs through weak or poorly managed keys and exposed certificate material that still validates trust across systems.
- Credential abuse follows when attackers use compromised certificates or private keys to impersonate services, intercept traffic, or gain unauthorized access.
- Impact appears as cryptographic exploitation, third-party certificate authority compromise, server private-key theft, or certificate-driven downtime that disrupts business services.
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
PKI is now a machine identity governance problem, not a back-office certificate task. The article shows that certificate volume, short renewal cycles, and hybrid deployment patterns have pushed PKI into the identity control plane. That changes the governance question from whether certificates exist to whether they are owned, inventoried, and lifecycle-managed with enough discipline to prevent trust drift. The practitioner implication is that PKI belongs inside machine identity governance, not beside it.
Certificate outages expose fragmented accountability more than technical fragility. When organizations rely on manual tracking and ad hoc renewal, they are signalling that no single control plane owns the certificate lifecycle end to end. That is why outages keep recurring even when the underlying cryptography is not broken. The field should read this as a governance failure mode: trust continuity cannot depend on tribal knowledge and ticket-based renewals. The practitioner implication is to redesign ownership so renewal, revocation, and exception handling are explicit and auditable.
Ephemeral certificate pressure is reshaping what 'good PKI' means. As validity windows shorten, the old assumption that certificates can be managed in periodic batches stops holding. The new operating model requires issuance-time visibility and policy-driven automation because the window for human intervention keeps shrinking. This does not make certificates less important; it makes lifecycle governance more central. The practitioner implication is to measure PKI success by continuity and control, not by how few alerts the team receives.
Machine identity risk now sits at the intersection of cryptography, operations, and audit readiness. The article links weak key management, downtime, and modernization pressure into a single pattern. That is a signal that PKI can no longer be treated as a specialist corner of infrastructure tooling. It belongs in the same governance conversation as NHI inventory, privileged access, and resilience reporting. The practitioner implication is to align certificate governance with broader identity and control frameworks, not just infrastructure maintenance.
Hidden cost is the wrong label if the board is already feeling downtime and risk. The article’s data show that certificate issues are no longer hidden once they affect service continuity, incident response, and compliance confidence. The problem is not awareness alone, but whether governance structures convert that awareness into control. The practitioner implication is to reframe PKI as a business-risk surface that needs executive ownership, not a technical backwater.
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
PKI governance now needs machine identity oversight, not just renewal administration. Teams that still separate certificate management from identity governance will keep rediscovering the same failure pattern at larger scale. The practical shift is to treat certificate inventories, ownership, and lifecycle policy as core controls in the NHI programme rather than adjunct infrastructure tasks.
Certificate lifetimes are shortening faster than many operating models can adapt. That pressure moves the control point from periodic review to continuous issuance-time governance. Organisations that wait for expiry events to prove policy effectiveness will keep learning too late that the renewal process itself has become the weakest link.
For practitioners
- Inventory every internal certificate Create a live inventory of internal certificates, private certificate authorities, and certificate owners across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. Tie each certificate to a system owner, renewal date, and business service dependency.
- Automate renewal and revocation workflows Remove manual renewal steps wherever possible and enforce policy-based renewal, revocation, and exception handling so short certificate lifetimes do not create outage windows.
- Map certificate ownership to machine services Assign accountable owners for workloads, devices, and machine-to-machine trust paths so no certificate exists without an operational steward and an escalation path.
- Measure PKI by continuity, not activity Track expiry-related downtime, renewal exceptions, and unresolved inventory gaps as control failures rather than routine maintenance noise.
Key takeaways
- PKI failures are increasingly machine identity failures because certificate ownership, inventory, and lifecycle control have not kept pace with enterprise scale.
- The article ties the problem to measurable strain, including 114,000 internal certificates on average and widespread downtime from expired or misconfigured certificates.
- Teams need to move certificate governance out of manual maintenance and into automated, accountable machine identity lifecycle control.
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 NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 — Secret Leakage | Key and certificate exposure turns trusted machine identity into an attack path. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | Long certificate lifetimes and stale renewal processes are central to the outage risk discussed. | |
| NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | Certificates often authorize more machine access than teams can currently govern cleanly. | |
| Recommendation — Scan for exposed certificate material and revoke any leaked keys immediately. Shorten credential lifetimes where possible and automate renewal before expiry windows become failures. Review certificate scope and remove unnecessary trust paths from machine identities. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | The article centers on lifecycle control of machine authenticators and renewal discipline. |
| Recommendation — Apply authenticator management controls to automate renewal, rotation, and revocation of certificates. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | Certificate-based access is an entitlement model that needs explicit governance and ownership. |
| Recommendation — Align certificate issuance and scope to least-privilege authorization requirements. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006;TA0040 — Credential Access; Impact | The article links weak key control to abuse of trusted credentials and business disruption. |
| Recommendation — Map certificate failures to credential-access and impact tactics in your detection and response planning. | ||
Key terms
- Certificate Sprawl: Certificate sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of certificates across systems, services, and environments. It creates operational risk because each certificate becomes another trust object that can expire, duplicate, or remain unowned, making outages and governance failures more likely.
- 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.
- PKI modernisation: PKI modernisation is the shift from manual, legacy certificate operations to managed, automated, and more visible certificate governance. It matters because the value is not only lower cost, but tighter control over expiry, ownership, and trust boundaries across the environment.
- Private Key: A private key is the secret half of an asymmetric cryptographic pair used to prove identity or sign data. In operational environments it can authenticate services, sign tokens, or decrypt traffic, which makes exposure a trust failure, not just a confidentiality issue.
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 May 27, 2026.
Updated on October 8, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org