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07/06/2026 8:12 pm
TL;DR: Legacy PKI can consume more than $1 million a year in maintenance, licensing, and professional services for federal agencies, while fragmented certificate authorities create blind spots, slow issuance, and preventable outages, according to Axiad. The governance issue is not just cost, but an identity model that assumes certificate management can stay manual, isolated, and reviewable at human speed.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Axiad: How Government Agencies Can Cut PKI Costs by 60%
By the numbers:
- Agencies implementing cloud-native PKI solutions typically reduce annual operating costs by approximately 60%.
- Policy-driven automation that replaces manual approval chains with intelligent workflows can reduce certificate issuance times by 80%.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should agencies reduce the operational burden of legacy PKI without disrupting authentication?
A: Agencies should move certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation into a governed lifecycle model that can run in parallel with legacy systems during migration.
Q: Why do fragmented certificate authorities create more identity risk than cost risk?
A: Fragmented certificate authorities create identity risk because they split ownership, visibility, and revocation across separate control planes.
Q: What breaks when certificate management stays manual in a Zero Trust programme?
A: Manual certificate management slows issuance, delays revocation, and weakens the continuous verification that Zero Trust depends on.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every certificate authority and trust chain Build a complete map of all Certificate Authorities, renewal workflows, and credential owners so no certificate sits outside a governed lifecycle.
- Replace manual approvals with policy-bound issuance Move routine issuance, renewal, and revocation into automated workflows that validate policy before certificates are created or extended.
- Tie certificate governance to Zero Trust delivery Use certificate lifecycle metrics as a readiness signal for Zero Trust work, including revocation speed, ownership completeness, and renewal latency.
What's in the full article
Axiad's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A step-by-step migration roadmap for moving federal PKI workloads into a cloud-native model without disrupting authentication.
- Implementation detail on certificate lifecycle automation across renewal, revocation, and policy validation workflows.
- Operational guidance on how the platform integrates with Active Directory, PAM, and Federal PKI Bridge relationships.
- The cost breakdown behind maintenance, HSM management, and professional services reduction claims.
👉 Read Axiad's analysis of federal PKI modernization and identity cost reduction →
Legacy PKI costs and certificate sprawl: what agencies should change?
Explore further
07/06/2026 10:01 pm
Legacy PKI is no longer just an infrastructure burden, it is an identity governance drag. When certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation are split across isolated authorities, the organisation loses a coherent lifecycle view of trust credentials. That fragmentation creates blind spots that are functionally similar to unmanaged NHI sprawl. Practitioners should treat distributed CA estates as governance debt that accumulates until it becomes a control failure.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average organisation believes more than 1 in 5 of their non-human identities are insufficiently secured, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when certificate failures cause outages or audit gaps?
A: Accountability should sit with the identity and platform owners who control the certificate lifecycle, not with the individual teams that consume certificates. Where multiple authorities and vendors are involved, governance must define ownership, revocation authority, and evidence retention clearly. That is the only way to make certificate control auditable rather than assumed.
👉 Read our full editorial: PKI modernization cuts federal identity overhead and audit burden
