How should organisations manage digital certificates in an IAM programme?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Digital certificates sit at the centre of machine trust, but many IAM programmes still treat them as infrastructure artefacts rather than identity assets. That creates blind spots around ownership, renewal, revocation and scope of use. When certificates are unmanaged, they become a quiet path to access persistence, service outages and audit failure. NHI Management Group’s guidance on NHI Lifecycle Management Guide and Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Regulatory and Audit Perspectives both point to the same operational truth: if certificates are not governed as identities, they will not be governed at all. This matters because certificate failure is rarely just a technical nuisance. In the Critical Gaps in Machine Identity Management report, certificate expiry is identified as the leading cause of outages for 45% of organisations, while 57% lack a complete inventory of machine identities. That combination means teams are often reacting to expired trust rather than preventing it. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 also reinforces that identity governance must be visible, repeatable and accountable, not implicit. In practice, many security teams discover certificate drift only after a service disruption, rather than through intentional identity lifecycle control.

How It Works in Practice

An IAM programme should manage certificates through the same lifecycle disciplines used for human and non-human identities: discovery, ownership, issuance, storage, rotation, renewal and revocation. The practical shift is to maintain certificate inventory alongside identities and entitlements, with clear metadata for application owner, issuing authority, expiry date, key usage, environment and revocation path. That inventory should feed IGA or governance workflows so that certificate risk is reviewed before expiry, not after alerts fire. A workable model usually includes:

• Automatic discovery of certificates across endpoints, applications, load balancers, containers and CI/CD pipelines.
• Defined ownership for each certificate, with an accountable business or technical owner.
• Policy-based renewal windows and revocation triggers tied to change management and incident response.
• Protected storage for private keys and certificates, with access controls and rotation records.
• Event-driven alerting for approaching expiry, weak algorithms or certificates issued outside approved processes.

For implementation, align IAM controls with NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls for access governance, auditability and cryptographic control expectations. In parallel, use NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues to frame certificates as part of the broader machine identity surface, not a separate PKI-only concern. The operational goal is simple: every certificate should have an owner, a lifecycle state and a control path that IAM can see. These controls tend to break down in fast-moving DevOps and ephemeral cloud environments because certificates are created and embedded faster than governance teams can inventory them.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter certificate governance often increases operational overhead, so organisations must balance resilience against deployment speed. That tradeoff is most visible in environments with short-lived workloads, hybrid cloud sprawl or legacy applications that cannot easily support automated renewal. Current guidance suggests there is no universal standard for certificate ownership models yet. Some organisations place certificates under security operations, while others assign them to platform, application or infrastructure teams. The better pattern is whichever model makes ownership explicit and auditable, with IAM as the control plane that tracks trust rather than the sole system that issues certificates. A few edge cases need special handling:

• Shared service certificates should still have one accountable owner, even if multiple teams consume them.
• Externally issued certificates need the same internal inventory and renewal tracking as internal PKI certificates.
• Certificates embedded in code, images or configuration files require secret-management controls, not just renewal reminders.
• Emergency revocation should be tested, because a revocation path that exists only on paper is not a control.

For organisations building maturity, the strongest reference point is the combination of The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report and NIST CSF 2.0: both support moving from reactive certificate handling to continuous governance. The practical takeaway is to make certificate inventory, expiry and revocation part of IAM operations, not an afterthought to PKI administration.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should organisations govern access across many APIs in a digital transformation programme?
• How should organisations manage third-party access as part of IAM governance?
• How do organisations govern certificates and device identities alongside IAM?
• What do organisations get wrong when they call an IAM programme passwordless too early?