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01/07/2026 2:01 am
TL;DR: A Forrester Total Economic Impact study cited by Keyfactor found that a composite organisation achieved payback in less than six months and completed deployment in about four months, with Year 1 benefits of $4.25 million against roughly $1.3 million in costs. The operational lesson is that certificate automation changes risk and resource planning faster than many PKI programmes assume.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Keyfactor: Fast PKI Modernization: A Practical Guide To Deploying In Months
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when certificate lifecycle management is still manual?
A: Manual certificate lifecycle management breaks first at renewal time, when expired or forgotten certificates interrupt authentication and service continuity.
Q: Why do machine identities become harder to manage as environments scale?
A: Machine identities become harder to manage because every new application, workload, or service adds another credential that must be inventoried, owned, renewed, and retired.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about phased PKI migration?
A: Security teams often assume PKI modernization requires a disruptive big-bang replacement.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory certificate ownership by service and business unit Build a current register that links each certificate to a system owner, renewal path, and expiry date so no workload depends on an anonymous credential.
- Automate the certificates closest to expiry first Start with manually managed certificates that have near-term renewal dates, then expand to higher-volume classes after the first automated renewals succeed.
- Run legacy and modern CA paths in parallel during transition Keep existing certificate authorities active while you migrate workloads in phases, so roots of trust are grandfathered rather than cut over all at once.
What's in the full article
Keyfactor's full post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The phased implementation model with resource allocation and transition sequencing for enterprise PKI.
- The cost breakdown behind the reported payback period and Year 1 benefit calculation.
- The deployment options across SaaS, hybrid, appliance, and on-premises environments.
- The practical migration approach for running legacy certificate authorities alongside the modern platform.
👉 Read Keyfactor's guide to fast PKI modernization in months →
PKI modernization in months: what IAM teams need to know?
Explore further
01/07/2026 2:20 am
PKI modernization is really certificate identity governance. Once certificates are tied to applications, services, and workloads, the problem stops being a cryptography project and becomes a lifecycle problem. Inventory, ownership, renewal timing, and offboarding determine whether the estate is governable. That is why certificate automation belongs alongside IAM, PAM, and workload identity operations, not outside them. Practitioners should treat certificate lifecycle as identity control, not infrastructure housekeeping.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of identity professionals find machine identities more challenging to manage than human identities, citing poor internal processes and insufficient tooling, according to The Critical Gaps in Machine Identity Management report.
- 61% rely on spreadsheets or manual tracking for machine identity management, which explains why renewal and ownership problems persist even when teams know the risk, according to The Critical Gaps in Machine Identity Management report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should organisations reduce certificate outage risk without replacing everything at once?
A: Organisations should automate the certificates with the nearest renewal dates first, keep legacy authorities operating during the transition, and validate each renewal path before expanding scope. That approach reduces outage exposure quickly while preserving service continuity. It also gives teams early evidence that the programme is working.
👉 Read our full editorial: Fast PKI modernization can reduce certificate risk in months
