Secure Certificates and PKI Across Hybrid Environments
CyberArk helps prevent outages, reduces complexity, and strengthens machine identity security by unifying certificate and PKI management across hybrid, multicloud, and multigenerational environments. Automate renewals, streamline internal issuance, and strengthen cryptographic control.
CHALLENGES
Modern challenges in securing certificates and PKI
Organizations face mounting pressure from expiring certificates, legacy PKI systems, scattered machine access, and ungoverned code signing workflows. These challenges increase operational risk, elevate outage likelihood, and make it difficult to maintain consistent, secure certificate and key practices across hybrid environments.
Outages from expired certificates
Short certificate lifespans and manual tracking lead to missed renewals and outages. Teams struggle to keep pace as environments scale and renewal cycles accelerate.
Legacy PKI cost and complexity
Legacy PKI requires expensive infrastructure, manual upkeep, and specialized expertise. These burdens slow modernization and make it difficult to scale certificate services across hybrid environments.
Unmanaged SSH keys and machine access
Certificates, SSH keys, and machine access are often managed separately, creating blind spots and inconsistent practices that make it difficult to control machine-to-machine authentication.
Uncontrolled code signing
Developers often store or share signing keys locally, creating unmonitored workflows and unverifiable artifacts that introduce risk across modern software supply chains.
SOLUTIONS
CyberArk solves certificate, PKI, SSH, and signing challenges
CyberArk delivers unified control over certificates, internal PKI, SSH access, and code signing. This solution addresses the operational gaps that lead to outages, delays, and hidden risk. With predictable automation, consistent governance, and seamless integrations, organizations strengthen machine identity security and improve resilience across hybrid environments.
Prevent certificate outages at scale
Maintain timely renewal, replacement, and deployment of every TLS certificate across hybrid environments. Prevent outages caused by manual tracking and fragmented ownership while preparing organizations for accelerated 47-day certificate lifecycles. With clear ownership, unified visibility, and predictable renewal cadences, teams maintain uninterrupted services, reduce operational risk, and avoid costly customer-facing disruptions.
Modernize PKI
Transform internal certificate issuance into a reliable, hands-free service. Remove the infrastructure, maintenance, and expertise burdens of running on-prem PKI, enabling teams to improve PKI delivery without rebuilding CA environments. Issuance becomes consistent, scalable, and always available, ensuring projects move faster without bottlenecks or operational fragility.
Eliminate blind spots in machine access
Give teams a consistent, governed model for machine-to-machine access. Remove blind spots created by unmanaged keys, reduce excessive or outdated access, and simplify audit preparation. Organizations gain confidence in how systems authenticate to one another and remove hidden operational risks that previously accumulated inside automation scripts and infrastructure services.
Protect software integrity and releases
Confirm every software artifact released is authorized, trusted, and verifiable. Prevent misuse of signing keys, stop unauthorized signing, and deliver full traceability across development pipelines. This strengthens software supply-chain integrity and supports secure development practices without requiring changes to developer workflows.
KEY CAPABILITIES & FEATURES
Core capabilities across certificates, PKI, SSH, and signing
CyberArk delivers consistent automation and governance through capabilities that unify certificate operations, streamline PKI, control machine access, and secure code signing workflows. These capabilities provide the technical foundation needed to support fast-moving cloud, hybrid, and development environments.
Automated certificate renewal
Continuously discovers certificates, validates status, schedules renewals, and replaces certificates using API-based orchestration across hybrid and cloud environments
Unified certificate inventory
Aggregates all certificates from public and private CAs into a single inventory with metadata, ownership details, lifecycle status, and policy alignment
Policy-driven certificate issuance
Applies certificate profiles, naming conventions, cryptographic standards, and validity periods automatically to every internal certificate request
SaaS-delivered PKI operations
Provides CA services with built-in redundancy, automated updates, and zero infrastructure requirements with no servers, HSMs, or CRL maintenance needed
SSH key discovery and rotation
Scans systems for SSH keys, maps trust relationships, identifies unmanaged or stale keys, and rotates authorized keys across hosts automatically
Centralized signing key control
Stores signing keys securely, enforces approval workflows, applies cryptographic policy, and integrates signing operations directly into CI/CD pipelines
BENEFITS & VALUES
Value of secure certificates & PKI
Shorter TLS lifetimes, exploding certificate volumes, brittle PKI, and unmanaged keys are driving outages, audit findings, and new attack paths. The statistics below show why securing certificates and PKI with automated, policy-driven control has become a core security priority for the business.
had at least one cert-related outage last year
express concern about reduced cert lifespans
average internal certs managed per organization
can’t keep pace with key and certificate growth
saw weak-crypto exploits tied to poor key control
rely on manual or ad-hoc tools for PKI assessment
RESOURCES
Essential insights for certificate and PKI security
From policy frameworks to renewal automation and cryptographic readiness, these resources provide a clear path for securing certificates and modernizing PKI at scale.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions: securing certificates & PKI
PKI issues certificates, while CLM governs the full lifecycle: discovery, ownership, policy enforcement, renewal, rotation, and retirement. Many outages occur not because PKI fails, but because lifecycle management is fragmented. Strong CLM unifies visibility and automation across all CAs — internal, public, and cloud-native.
Automation removes the manual steps that lead to the majority of certificate outages — missed expirations, misconfigurations, delayed approvals, and inconsistent renewals. Automated lifecycle management ensures certificates are discovered, monitored, renewed, and deployed before expiration, even in fast-changing cloud environments.
Manual workflows — spreadsheets, ticket-based renewals, standalone tooling — lead to frequent errors: missed renewals, mismatched cryptographic settings, overlooked SSH keys or unused certificates. Additionally, manual PKI management demands specialized expertise, slows down deployment cycles, and makes cryptographic transitions (e.g. algorithm upgrades, short-lived certificates) cumbersome — leaving organizations vulnerable to outages, compliance gaps, or cryptographic risks.
Hybrid and multicloud environments often contain thousands of certificates issued by different teams, tools, and CAs. Without CA-neutral discovery, organizations miss shadow certificates, orphaned keys, and unmanaged endpoints. These hidden certificates are one of the leading causes of unplanned downtime and audit failures.
A robust solution should: support multiple CAs (internal and public), provide complete discovery of all certificates (even forgotten or rogue ones), offer automation for issuance/renewal/revocation, enforce consistent cryptographic policy, and deliver centralized visibility and audit logs. Such features help prevent unexpected outages, manage certificate sprawl, and enable compliance across hybrid or cloud environments.
Modern CLM/PKI tools aim to go beyond just managing certificates — they unify lifecycle automation, policy-driven governance, and support for internal and external CAs, offering more scalability. Traditional tools may provide decent certificate discovery and renewal workflows, but often lack deeper PKI governance, cross-CA support, or crypto-agility required for large, dynamic environments. For example, some are less effective at handling high certificate volume, multi-CA issuance, or enforcing consistent policy across cloud and on-prem systems.
Shorter certificate lifespans dramatically increase renewal frequency, making manual tracking or legacy PKI tools unsustainable. As public TLS validity moves from 398 days toward 200, 100, and eventually 47 days, organizations face 8–12× more renewals, higher outage risk, and heavier compliance pressure. Legacy PKI solutions and workflow-driven CLM products often can’t orchestrate renewals at this pace. Automation, cross-CA agility, and centralized policy enforcement become essential to avoid expired certificates, downtime, and audit failures.
Legacy PKI tools often rely on manual certificate issuance, renewal, and tracking — which doesn’t scale when certificate volumes climb or certificate lifespans shrink. This creates blind spots (forgotten certificates, expired TLS certs, missed renewals), leading to service downtime, audit failures, or security gaps.
Yes, managed or SaaS-based PKI (often called “managed PKI”) offers the flexibility and scalability of cloud delivery while still allowing organizations to define cryptographic policies, manage issuing CA roots, and enforce governance. This approach reduces maintenance overhead (no on-prem HSMs or CA servers), supports hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure, and helps ensure consistent compliance and audit readiness across the enterprise.
Zero Trust requires continuous verification — and certificates provide the cryptographic identity that enables that trust. Automated CLM and PKI ensure every workload, device, and service uses up-to-date, policy-compliant certificates, reducing the attack surface and strengthening machine-to-machine authentication.
