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25/06/2026 10:33 pm
TL;DR: Certificate-related outages hit 86% of organisations in the past year, with 31% experiencing them at least quarterly and 10% seeing weekly disruption, as Keyfactor’s Digital Trust Digest: The Automation Edition finds, with visibility and automation gaps driving operational risk. The real problem is not certificate expiry alone, but governance built on incomplete inventory, weak ownership, and partial automation.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Keyfactor: Digital Certificate Outages Are a Weekly Reality for 1 in 10 Enterprises
By the numbers:
- An overwhelming 86% of companies suffered at least one outage and subsequent disruption due to expired or mismanaged digital certificates within the past year.
- Only 17% of practitioners reported having complete, real-time visibility across all certificates.
- 70% of respondents report pressure to automate certificate, ificate lifecycle management.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when certificate lifecycle management is not fully visible?
A: When certificate lifecycle management lacks visibility, teams do not know what exists, who owns it, or when it will expire.
Q: Why do short certificate lifespans create more risk for machine identity programmes?
A: Shorter lifespans compress the time available for discovery, approval, deployment, and rollback.
Q: How can security teams tell whether certificate automation is actually working?
A: Automation is working when discovery, renewal, deployment, and exception handling all happen with minimal manual intervention and no outage-driven surprises.
Practitioner guidance
- Build a complete certificate inventory Map every certificate to an owner, system, expiry date, and deployment location so renewal is driven by authoritative data rather than ad hoc discovery.
- Automate the full certificate lifecycle Extend automation beyond renewal requests to include deployment, validation, rollback, and exception handling across the environments where certificates are used.
- Tie renewal windows to the shortest validity period Review alerting and renewal schedules against the shortest certificate lifetime in your estate so shortening validity does not create avoidable outage risk.
What's in the full report
Keyfactor's full press release covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Survey methodology and respondent breakdown for the 450 PKI and certificate management practitioners included in the study
- Detailed percentage splits for visibility, automation success, and renewal process adoption across certificate teams
- Executive commentary on why certificate management is becoming a business resilience issue as lifespans shorten
- The report download link and the vendor's framing of automation as a growth and reliability lever
👉 Read Keyfactor's research on certificate outages and automation gaps →
Digital certificate outages: what IAM teams need to fix now?
Explore further
25/06/2026 11:07 pm
Certificate outages are a machine identity governance problem before they are an uptime problem. The research shows that organisations are still trying to manage certificates as isolated technical artefacts, even though they now function as persistent workload identities across complex environments. That framing fails because ownership, visibility, and renewal discipline are governance controls, not after-the-fact recovery tasks. Practitioners should read outage data as evidence that machine identity governance is still immature.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 66% say their current tooling is not adequate to manage the scale of machine identities they now have, according to The Critical Gaps in Machine Identity Management report.
- 57% of organisations lack a complete inventory of their machine identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable when certificate outages affect business services?
A: Accountability should sit with the team that owns the machine trust path, not only with infrastructure operations. Certificates are identity assets with operational consequences, so ownership must cover inventory accuracy, renewal timing, and incident response across the full dependency chain.
👉 Read our full editorial: Certificate outages expose the governance gap in machine identity management
