Topic starter
30/09/2026 5:00 pm
TL;DR: As TLS certificate lifetimes move toward 47 days, manual renewal and fragmented ownership are becoming harder to sustain across machine identities, raising outage, visibility, and governance risk, according to Akeyless. The operational challenge is not just faster renewal, but governing certificate volume, ownership, and automation at machine scale.
NHIMG editorial: here’s why we think this discussion matters
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when machine identity management stays tied to manual certificate processes?
A: Manual processes break first at scale and then at auditability.
Q: When should organisations prioritise automation over manual certificate handling?
A: Automation should be the default once an organisation manages more than a small number of certificates, because scale makes manual renewal unreliable.
Practitioner guidance
- Map certificate-backed machine identities Create a service-by-service inventory of certificates, keys, and secrets used by cloud workloads, APIs, containers, and pipelines so expiry risk is visible before renewal deadlines hit.
- Assign named lifecycle ownership Define one accountable owner for issuance, renewal, and revocation for each machine identity so fragmented responsibilities do not delay renewal decisions.
- Automate renewal and revocation workflows Use orchestration that can issue, renew, and retire certificates without manual handoffs, while preserving audit records for each lifecycle event.
What to expect at the briefing
Akeyless's full webinar covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Live discussion on certificate lifecycle automation for modern machine identity estates
- Speaker perspective on combining trusted certificate services with governance and renewal workflows
- Practical discussion of how shorter certificate lifetimes affect cloud, hybrid, and DevOps environments
- Operational framing for reducing outages caused by unmanaged certificates
👉 Register for Akeyless's webinar on the 47-day certificate era and machine identity governance →
47-day certificates: are machine identity controls keeping up?
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30/09/2026 5:00 pm
Certificate lifecycle is now a machine identity governance problem, not a PKI housekeeping issue. When certificate validity shortens, the operational burden shifts from periodic renewal to continuous identity control across workloads, APIs, and automated systems. That means the programme has to govern issuance, renewal, revocation, and ownership as one lifecycle. The practical conclusion is that certificate management and machine identity governance are now the same control surface.
A few things that frame the scale:
- NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
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.
👉 Read our full editorial: The 47-day certificate era raises machine identity governance risk