Topic starter
24/06/2026 6:55 pm
TL;DR: Only 34% of organisations report complete certificate visibility, while 74% are highly concerned about certificate sprawl and nearly three-quarters fear outages from expired certificates, according to DigiCert’s 2026 Global PKI Research Report. Manual PKI management is no longer sustainable when machine identities multiply faster than teams can inventory, review, and automate them.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by DigiCert: “DigiCert Research Reveals Major Certificate Visibility Blind Spot for Enterprises”.
Key questions
Q: How should security teams prevent certificate outages in distributed environments?
A: Security teams should centralise certificate inventory, assign explicit ownership, and automate both renewal and deployment.
Q: Why does certificate sprawl make PKI modernization harder?
A: Because sprawl spreads certificates across too many systems for manual oversight to keep pace.
Q: What are the signs that certificate governance is failing in critical infrastructure?
A: Common warning signs include unclear ownership, expired certificates, mixed use of approved and unapproved issuers, and last-minute manual renewals.
Practitioner guidance
- Define a current certificate inventory baseline Build one authoritative view of all certificates, owners, expiry dates, and deployment locations across infrastructure, applications, and devices.
- Eliminate spreadsheet-based tracking Replace manual tracking methods with automated discovery and lifecycle workflows so renewal and revocation are driven from current data.
- Assign ownership for every certificate Require named business or technical owners for each certificate so no renewal, revocation, or policy exception sits without accountability.
Bottom line: Incomplete certificate visibility creates a governance gap that undermines renewal, revocation, and policy enforcement across modern PKI estates.
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25/06/2026 3:56 am
Certificate visibility is now a governance control, not an inventory nicety: The article shows that organisations cannot modernise PKI if they do not know where certificates live or who owns them. That is an identity governance problem because certificates are machine trust credentials, and incomplete visibility turns lifecycle management into guesswork. Practitioners should treat current inventory as the prerequisite for every downstream PKI decision.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
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. The turning point is not a specific count, but the moment certificates span teams, tools, and infrastructure layers that no single person can track safely.
👉 Read our full editorial: Certificate visibility blind spots are slowing PKI modernization