Certificate management is the act of monitoring, facilitating, and executing digital certificates (x.509) throughout their certificate lifecycle. It plays a critical role in ensuring secure, encrypted communications between clients and servers by preventing expired or misconfigured certificates from disrupting trust or availability.
As organizations scale and face new compliance demands—such as the TLS certificate validity now being cut to just 47 days —effective certificate management becomes essential to help avoiding outages, mitigate risk, and maintain digital trust.
Core functions of certificate management
Effective certificate management platforms automate and centralize all tasks involved in managing a digital certificate from discovery to revocation. The ten core functions include:
| Function | Description |
|---|---|
| Detection | Continuously scans for expired, misconfigured, or non-compliant certificates across your environment.
Identifies weaknesses before they lead to outages or breaches. |
| Creation | Generates certificates based on predefined policies and cryptographic standards. |
| Procurement | Procures certificates from trusted certificate authorities (CAs) when needed. |
| Storage | Securely stores certificates and private keys in a centralized, encrypted repository. |
| Distribution | Sends certificates to relevant systems and users. |
| Deployment | Applies certificates to devices or services. |
| Renewal | Refreshes certificates before expiration. |
| Suspension | Temporarily disables a certificate. |
| Revocation | Permanently invalidates certificates. |
| Replacement | Replaces deprecated or compromised certificates. |
A good certificate management tool will perform these actions for an entire certificate infrastructure, automatically and in real-time, to prevent downtime and outages.
What are the benefits of automated certificate management?
Manual certificate processes are labor-intensive, error-prone, and too slow for today’s fast-paced environments. Automated certificate management brings 10 measurable benefits, including :
- Reduced operational costs.
- Less human intervention.
- Fewer certificate-related outages.
- Streamlined acquisition, deployment, and renewal workflows.
- Consolidated and well-organized certificate inventory.
- Transparent, continuously monitored SSL/TLS environments.
- Clear accountability through policy enforcement.
- Improved scalability and performance.
- Stronger risk mitigation.
- Protected brand reputation.
The table below outlines the key differences between manual and automated certificate management, highlighting how automation improves visibility, efficiency, and security:
| Feature | Manual | Automated |
|---|---|---|
| Certificate discovery | Ad hoc and error-prone. | Continuous, real-time discovery across all environments. |
| Issuance & renewal | Time-consuming; prone to expiration. | Scheduled and policy-driven; auto-renews before expiry. |
| Outages | High risk due to expired or misconfigured certificates. | Minimal risk with proactive renewal and alerts. |
| Overhead | High labor and time investment. | Reduced staff workload and faster response times. |
| Certificate inventory | Decentralized; difficult to track. | Centralized dashboard with full visibility. |
| Incident response | Slow and reactive. | Fast remediation with automatic revocation and replacement. |
| Compliance | Manual audits and data collection. | Manual audits and data collection. |
| Scalability | Difficult to scale with growing environments. | Easily scales across hybrid, cloud, and multi-cluster deployments. |
| Security posture | Inconsistent and vulnerable. | Stronger security through automation, standardization, and reduced attack surface. |
How shortened certificate lifespans are changing the game
Beginning in 2025, the TLS certificate ecosystem began shifting toward shorter certificate lifespans, with a maximum validity of just 47 days. This industry-wide move makes manual tracking and renewal unsustainable.
There are three primary drivers behind the shift to automated certificate management.
- Frequent renewals now require scalable, real-time automation.
- Policy enforcement must be continuous across all environments.
- Discovery of unmanaged certificates helps eliminate security blind spots.
Meanwhile, stolen digital certificates are now a growing underground market. When abused, they can bypass firewalls and impersonate trusted systems—putting sensitive data at risk. Protecting SSL certificates (and the digital assets they provide) is made significantly easier and stronger with automation. Automating certificate management helps provide faster incident response time, improved compliance enforcement, a reduced attack surface, and greater confidence in encrypted connections.
How CyberArk helps with certificate management
CyberArk Certificate Manager helps organizations to automate certificate operations from discovery and issuance to renewal and revocation. Built for machine identity security, it helps teams maintain compliance, reduce outages, and scale securely in hybrid and cloud environments.
CyberArk’s SaaS-based solution integrates with ACME, SCEP, and EST protocols and centralizes policy enforcement to simplify certificate operations.
FAQs
What is a digital certificate?
A digital certificate is a cryptographic credential that verifies the identity of an entity—such as a user, server, or device—and enables encrypted, trusted communication over the internet. Issued by a Certificate Authority (CA), it contains information such as the public key, entity details, expiration date, and digital signature of the issuing CA. Digital certificates are fundamental to establishing trust in TLS/SSL connections, secure email, code signing, and other identity-based security protocols.
What is the certificate lifecycle?
The certificate lifecycle is the full timeline a certificate follows—from initial creation and issuance to deployment, usage, renewal, and eventual revocation or replacement.
Managing this lifecycle helps ensure that certificates are valid, trusted, and aligned with organizational policies. Poor lifecycle management can result in outages, compliance failures, and security risks. Lifecycle automation is essential for keeping up with changes like the 47-day TLS validity limit and for maintaining visibility across large, complex environments.
