PKI certificate outages: what IAM teams need to fix now

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.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Keyfactor: Certificate Outages Are Preventable: Reduce PKI Risk

By the numbers:

• After deployment, the composite organisation reduced certificate-related incidents by 85% in year one, 90% in year two, and 95% by year three.
• Approximately 5% of security incidents involving external or internal attacks were related to certificate vulnerabilities.

Questions worth separating out

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 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: What do organisations get wrong about certificate visibility?

A: They assume visibility is a reporting task when it is actually a control boundary.

Practitioner guidance

• Establish a single certificate inventory Create one authoritative view of all certificates across cloud, on-premises, applications, and team-owned tooling, then assign named ownership for each asset before the next renewal cycle.
• Automate renewal and deployment together Do not stop at renewal automation.
• Tie certificate lifecycle to compliance evidence Map certificate discovery, rotation, and audit records to PCI DSS 4.0, DORA, and EU Cyber Resilience Act obligations so the same control set supports resilience and reporting.

What's in the full article

Keyfactor's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Per-incident cost modelling and the three-year risk-adjusted present value calculations behind the outage analysis
• Detailed deployment examples showing how automated certificate installation reduces error across complex environments
• The full Forrester-derived breakdown of incident reduction over time, including year-by-year improvement assumptions
• Compliance and audit discussion tied to certificate governance across regulated environments

👉 Read Keyfactor's analysis of preventable PKI certificate outages →

PKI certificate outages: what IAM teams need to fix now?

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