Topic starter
08/02/2026 10:25 pm
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.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by CyberArk: “The hidden cost of PKI: Why certificate failures aren’t just an IT problem”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when certificate ownership is split across many teams?
A: Visibility breaks first, then accountability, then renewal discipline.
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.
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.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every internal certificate Create a live inventory of internal certificates, private certificate authorities, and certificate owners across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.
- 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.
Bottom line: PKI failures are increasingly machine identity failures because certificate ownership, inventory, and lifecycle control have not kept pace with enterprise scale.
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This topic was modified 4 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
08/10/2026 4:42 pm
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.
A few things that frame the scale:
- According to the 2023 State of Machine Identity Management report, only 47% of companies have enough staff dedicated to their PKI.
A question worth separating out:
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.
👉 Read our full editorial: PKI certificate failures expose the hidden cost of machine identity