Topic starter
25/06/2026 1:17 am
TL;DR: Certificate-related outages are predictable consequences of fragmented inventory, manual renewal, and incorrect deployment, with a Forrester TEI study cited by Keyfactor finding 18 to 22 incidents a year at an average cost of $100,000 each. When certificate estates are unmanaged, the control problem is not expiry alone, but the lack of centralized visibility and lifecycle governance that allows failures to repeat.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Keyfactor: “Certificate Outages Are Preventable: Reduce PKI Risk”.
By the numbers:
- The study says organisations reduced certificate-related incidents by 85% in year one, 90% in year two, and 95% by year three.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when certificate administration is fragmented across too many tools and teams?
A: Fragmentation makes it harder to see where certificates live, who controls them, and whether policy is being enforced consistently.
Q: Why do manual certificate processes still cause outages after renewal?
A: Manual processes fail because renewal and installation are different steps, and either one can break production.
Q: How should security teams measure whether certificate governance is actually working?
A: Use operational signals, not policy statements.
Practitioner guidance
- Centralise certificate inventory Create one authoritative certificate inventory that spans all certificate authorities, cloud accounts, endpoints, and application owners so no certificate sits outside governance.
- Automate renewal and deployment together Remove manual certificate replacement steps from production paths and require deployment validation so a renewed certificate cannot still break service.
- Assign named ownership for every certificate family Map each certificate to a responsible service owner and renewal path so teams are not relying on informal knowledge when expiry approaches.
Bottom line: Certificate outages are usually the result of broken lifecycle governance, not a single expired asset.
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25/06/2026 10:36 am
Certificate outage risk is primarily a machine identity governance problem, not an expiry problem. Expiry is only the final symptom when inventory, ownership, and lifecycle controls are fragmented. The deeper issue is that most organisations still cannot answer basic questions about where certificates exist, who owns them, and whether deployment is validated. That makes certificate governance a lifecycle discipline, not a point control.
A few things that frame the scale:
- An unplanned outage in a cloud environment costs an average of $9,000 per minute, per the Uptime Institute’s 2023 Global Data Center Survey.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Which controls matter most for preventing certificate-related downtime?
A: The most important controls are authoritative inventory, automated renewal, verified deployment, and named ownership across the certificate lifecycle. Those controls prevent the three common failure modes in the article: unknown expirations, incorrect installation, and shadow certificate sprawl. Together they turn certificate management from a reactive task into a governed lifecycle.
👉 Read our full editorial: PKI certificate outages are a visibility and automation problem