TL;DR: Certificate-related outages are predictable consequences of fragmented inventory, manual renewal, and incorrect deployment, with a Forrester TEI study cited by Keyfactor finding 18 to 22 incidents a year at an average cost of $100,000 each. When certificate estates are unmanaged, the control problem is not expiry alone, but the lack of centralized visibility and lifecycle governance that allows failures to repeat.
At a glance
What this is: NHI Mgmt Group's analysis, drawing on Keyfactor's blog post: Visibility gaps plus manual processes make PKI certificate expirations and bad deployments predictable.
Why it matters: It matters because certificate governance sits underneath both service uptime and identity assurance, so IAM and security teams need inventory, renewal, and deployment controls that work at scale.
By the numbers:
- The cited Forrester study found 18 to 22 certificate-related incidents per year for the composite organisation.
- The study says organisations reduced certificate-related incidents by 85% in year one, 90% in year two, and 95% by year three.
Context
PKI certificate outages are a governance and operations problem as much as a technical one. Certificates expire, but the outage is usually created earlier when inventory is fragmented, ownership is unclear, and renewal work depends on manual coordination across teams.
In identity terms, this is a machine identity lifecycle issue: certificates are issued, tracked, renewed, deployed, and eventually retired across servers, cloud services, and applications. When that lifecycle is handled inconsistently, outages become repetitive rather than exceptional.
Keyfactor argues that the typical starting point in many organisations is atypical for mature certificate governance because there is no single source of truth for the estate.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when certificate administration is fragmented across too many tools and teams?
A: Fragmentation makes it harder to see where certificates live, who controls them, and whether policy is being enforced consistently. Teams end up with duplicated effort, slower response to expiring certificates, and weaker auditability. A centralised management model is important because it aligns logs, user administration, access controls, and lifecycle actions in one operating view.
Q: Why do manual certificate processes still cause outages after renewal?
A: Manual processes fail because renewal and installation are different steps, and either one can break production. Teams often renew a certificate successfully but miss a dependency, install it on the wrong endpoint, or leave an old version in place. That is why renewal automation without deployment validation still leaves outage risk in place.
Q: How should security teams measure whether certificate governance is actually working?
A: Use operational signals, not policy statements. Track certificate expiry outages, provisioning and revocation latency, support ticket volume, and whether teams can identify all cryptographic assets in use. If a trust programme looks compliant on paper but still produces outages, workarounds or blind spots, governance is not working as intended.
Q: Which controls matter most for preventing certificate-related downtime?
A: The most important controls are authoritative inventory, automated renewal, verified deployment, and named ownership across the certificate lifecycle. Those controls prevent the three common failure modes in the article: unknown expirations, incorrect installation, and shadow certificate sprawl. Together they turn certificate management from a reactive task into a governed lifecycle.
Technical breakdown
Why certificate visibility fails in distributed estates
Certificate visibility breaks when ownership, inventory, and renewal tracking are split across teams and tools. In a distributed estate, the problem is not that certificates do not exist in records, but that no system has a complete, current view of where they live, who owns them, or when they expire. That makes expiry a discovery problem before it becomes an availability problem. Shadow certificates are especially dangerous because they sit outside central governance and therefore outside normal alerting and accountability paths.
Practical implication: build a single inventory that covers all certificate authorities, cloud environments, endpoints, and application owners.
Why manual renewal creates outage risk
Manual certificate renewal adds human error to a process that is already time-bound and dependency-heavy. A renewal can succeed cryptographically and still fail operationally if a certificate is installed on the wrong endpoint, misses a dependency, or is deployed inconsistently across environments. At scale, the failure mode is not incompetence, it is that people are asked to execute precise, repetitive changes across too many targets without automation or validation. That is why successful renewal does not guarantee successful service restoration.
Practical implication: automate renewal and deployment together, then validate installation before the old certificate is retired.
How certificate outages become a lifecycle governance issue
Certificate outages persist when organisations treat certificates as one-off assets instead of governed identities with a lifecycle. Discovery, ownership, issuance, renewal, deployment, and revocation need to be coordinated as one control chain. When each team manages its own tools and process, governance fragments and risk concentrates in the gaps between systems. That is why the same expiry or misconfiguration can recur across different services even after an outage is fixed once.
Practical implication: align certificate governance to a lifecycle model, not to isolated team workflows.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker or failure condition aims to interrupt trusted service operation and create availability or trust loss at the certificate boundary.
- Entry occurs when a certificate expires or is deployed incorrectly in a service path that was not centrally tracked.
- Credential or authenticator abuse follows when the certificate can no longer be trusted or is installed in the wrong place, disrupting service trust.
- Impact is immediate service outage, customer disruption, or a weakened security posture that attackers can exploit if certificate weaknesses remain visible.
- The attacker objective is not always theft of data, but disruption of service availability and trust in the certificate-backed channel.
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
Certificate outage risk is primarily a machine identity governance problem, not an expiry problem. Expiry is only the final symptom when inventory, ownership, and lifecycle controls are fragmented. The deeper issue is that most organisations still cannot answer basic questions about where certificates exist, who owns them, and whether deployment is validated. That makes certificate governance a lifecycle discipline, not a point control.
Shadow certificate exposure is the clearest sign that central governance has failed. When teams maintain separate tools and processes, certificate estates become partially invisible and outages become structurally repeatable. That hidden inventory is not just an operational inconvenience. It is a control gap that increases both availability risk and audit burden. Practitioners should treat unmanaged certificate sprawl as an evidence problem first and a remediation problem second.
Automating renewal without automating deployment only moves the failure point. A certificate that renews successfully but lands incorrectly still creates downtime. The article shows that certificate control has to span the full lifecycle, from discovery through installation verification. Partial automation lowers effort but does not remove outage conditions unless the whole handoff chain is governed.
PKI outage reduction depends on centralized ownership, not just better tooling. The value of visibility is that it creates accountable process boundaries around a shared certificate estate. Without those boundaries, local team autonomy turns into governance drift. The practitioner takeaway is that certificate lifecycle governance should be managed like a cross-domain service catalogue, with clear ownership and renewal control before the next expiry window.
PKI modernisation is now a resilience and compliance discipline, not only a cryptography project. The article ties certificate governance to downtime reduction, audit efficiency, and readiness for tighter regulatory expectations. That means identity and security leaders need to evaluate certificate lifecycle maturity as part of operational resilience, not as an isolated PKI task.
From our research library:
- An unplanned outage in a cloud environment costs an average of $9,000 per minute, per the Uptime Institute’s 2023 Global Data Center Survey.
What this signals
PKI certificate governance now sits at the intersection of uptime, auditability, and machine identity control. Teams that only monitor expiry are managing the symptom, not the control surface. The real programme question is whether certificates are governed as a lifecycle with ownership, inventory, renewal, and deployment boundaries that can be evidenced.
Central visibility changes the operating model, not just the dashboard. Once certificates are inventoried across clouds, endpoints, and application teams, the security function can move from chasing outages to enforcing accountability for renewal and replacement. That is the practical shift this article points to for IAM and platform teams.
Certificate estates should be treated as an identity sprawl problem. When local teams procure and manage certificates independently, governance fragments in the same way that unmanaged secrets or service accounts do. The implication is that certificate lifecycle work belongs in the broader identity and access programme, not in an isolated PKI corner.
For practitioners
- Centralise certificate inventory Create one authoritative certificate inventory that spans all certificate authorities, cloud accounts, endpoints, and application owners so no certificate sits outside governance.
- Automate renewal and deployment together Remove manual certificate replacement steps from production paths and require deployment validation so a renewed certificate cannot still break service.
- Assign named ownership for every certificate family Map each certificate to a responsible service owner and renewal path so teams are not relying on informal knowledge when expiry approaches.
- Treat shadow certificates as a governance incident Escalate any certificate discovered outside the central inventory as a lifecycle control failure, then reconcile issuance, use, and revocation status.
Key takeaways
- Certificate outages are usually the result of broken lifecycle governance, not a single expired asset.
- The cited Forrester study found 18 to 22 incidents a year at an average cost of $100,000 each, which makes certificate failure both frequent and expensive.
- Central inventory, automated renewal, and verified deployment are the controls that turn certificate management from recurring firefighting into repeatable governance.
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-01 — Improper Offboarding | Certificates are failing to retire cleanly when ownership and lifecycle tracking are fragmented. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | Long-lived certificates create the expiry and rotation risk at the centre of this article. | |
| Recommendation — Track certificate retirement and revocation as a governed lifecycle step, not an ad hoc cleanup task. Shorten certificate lifetimes where feasible and enforce renewal workflows before expiry windows open. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | The article is fundamentally about managing certificate authenticators across their lifecycle. |
| Recommendation — Apply IA-5 to govern issuance, renewal, replacement, and revocation of certificate authenticators. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006 — Credential Access | Expired or mismanaged certificates can expose trust paths attackers exploit through credential abuse. |
| Recommendation — Map certificate weaknesses to credential access risks and prioritise exposed trust paths for review. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | Certificate governance here is about controlling who and what can authenticate and when. |
| Recommendation — Use PR.AA-05 to align certificate-based access with explicit entitlement and ownership rules. | ||
Key terms
- Credential Lifecycle Governance: Credential lifecycle governance is the set of controls that manage creation, assignment, monitoring, rotation, and retirement of credentials. For machine identities, it prevents secrets from becoming permanent access artifacts and ensures every identity has a defined owner, purpose, and end state.
- Shadow Certificates: Shadow certificates are certificates that exist outside the organisation's authoritative inventory or lifecycle control. They create blind spots similar to unmanaged non-human identities, because no one can reliably prove who owns them, when they expire, or how quickly they can be revoked.
- 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.
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 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org