Automating 47-Day Certificate Lifecycles

Automating 47-Day Certificate Lifecycles

Uncategorized

Key Takeaways

  • Automation reduces certificate management time by 73-82%, transforming 23,298 annual hours to just 500-750 hours for 1,000 certificates.
  • Organizations face an average of 4 certificate-related outages over 2 years, with each incident costing $11.1 million per outage event
  • ACME protocol enables automated certificate renewal with validation typically completed in seconds, compared to hours or days for manual processes
  • Organizations typically discover 5-10 times more certificates than expected during automated discovery processes
  • Implementation requires three phases: Discovery (2-4 weeks), Automation Deployment (6-8 weeks), and Enterprise Scale (3-6 months)

As TLS certificate validity periods compress from 398 days today to just 47 days by 2029, manual certificate management becomes increasingly challenging, ultimately transforming into a mathematically impossible task. Organizations managing a 1,000-certificate portfolio will require 21 certificate operations daily, excluding weekends and holidays. This technical guide provides a comprehensive blueprint for implementing certificate lifecycle automation, delivering measurable ROI while preparing your infrastructure for the future of digital identity management.

Understanding Certificate Lifecycle Automation

What Is Certificate Lifecycle Automation?

Certificate lifecycle automation encompasses the end-to-end orchestration of TLS certificate operations through programmatic workflows, eliminating the need for manual intervention. Unlike traditional approaches requiring human operators to track expiration dates, generate certificate signing requests (CSRs), and install certificates, automated systems handle the entire lifecycle, from initial provisioning through renewal and eventual decommissioning, without human touchpoints for standard operations.
Modern certificate lifecycle automation platforms such as AVX ONE integrate directly with certificate authorities (CAs), infrastructure components, and security tools to create a self-healing ecosystem. When a certificate approaches expiration, the system automatically initiates renewal, validates domain control, obtains the new certificate, deploys it across all endpoints, and verifies successful installation, all while maintaining comprehensive audit trails.

The Business Case for Automation

The certificate authority market’s growth from $173.1 million in 2023 to a projected $401.4 million by 2030 reflects the rapidly increasing demand for digital certificates. As certificate volumes surge, manual processes cannot scale. With 71% of IT professionals admitting they don’t know their actual certificate count, automation becomes essential for maintaining visibility and control.

The economic argument for certificate lifecycle automation extends beyond preventing outages. ITIC found that over 90% of respondents estimated their cost of downtime to be over $300,000 per hour, standing true even for small and midsize organizations upto 200 employees.

Cost and risk statistics for certificate outages

ITIC states that if you’re a micro SMB with less than 25 employees and one server, your downtime might be an “extremely conservative” $1,670 per minute or about $100,000 an hour.

Core Components of Automated PKI Management

Discovery and Inventory Management

Comprehensive discovery forms the foundation of successful automation. By utilising discovery tools, organisations typically uncover more certificates than are tracked in spreadsheets. The visibility gap creates significant risk, as unmanaged certificates become potential failure points.

Automated discovery must encompass:

  • Network scanning for TLS endpoints
  • Cloud service integration (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
  • Container and Kubernetes pod inspection
  • Load balancer and CDN certificate identification
  • IoT device certificate cataloging

Automated discovery and up-to-date inventory are prerequisites for reaching upper maturity levels (4 & 5) as emphasized by The PKI Consortium’s maturity model for modern certificate management.

Automated Renewal and Provisioning

The ACME protocol (RFC 8555) revolutionizes certificate provisioning by enabling automated validation that typically completes in a matter of seconds. This represents a dramatic reduction from the manual process, which can take hours to days per certificate or even 10 days to a month for complete renewal and installation.

Policy Engine and Governance

Effective automation requires robust policy enforcement. AppViewX’s policy engine enables organisations to define and enforce standards for:

  • Key specifications: Minimum key lengths (2048-bit RSA, 256-bit ECC)
  • Certificate attributes: SAN requirements, validity periods, signature algorithms
  • Approval workflows: Risk-based routing for high-value certificates
  • Compliance requirements: Industry standards (PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2)

As cryptographic standards evolve, automation must also support crypto-agility. According to NIST and NSA guidance, organizations should begin preparing for post-quantum cryptography transitions before 2030, making policy-driven automation a critical capability.

Implementation Blueprint: Three-Phase Approach

Implementation blueprint showing three automation phases

Phase 1: Discovery and Assessment

Begin with comprehensive visibility using automated certificate discovery tools to identify all certificates across your infrastructure. The Enterprise Strategy Group research shows non-human identities outnumber human ones by 20:1, making thorough discovery essential.
Key activities:

  • Deploy agentless scanning across network segments
  • Integrate with cloud platforms and container orchestrators
  • Document certificate ownership and dependencies
  • Calculate baseline metrics for ROI measurement
  • Identify high-risk certificates for priority automation

Phase 2: Transform Core Processes Through Smart Automation

Automate Critical Workflows

Replace manual renewal checks with automated workflows. With platforms like AppViewX AVX ONE, certificates renew automatically before expiration without human intervention for standard requests. As CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements evolve, automation ensures continuous compliance across the organization.

Implement Policy-Driven Management

  • Instant policy-driven revocation with complete audit trails
  • Dynamic compliance dashboards replacing manual data collection]
  • Automated compliance reporting, reducing quarterly audit preparation from days to hours

Establish Governance Frameworks

Form a cross-functional Machine Identity Management Working Group to:

Phase 3: Achieve Enterprise-Scale Automation and Crypto-Agility

Native Platform Integration

Replace custom scripts with native Kubernetes integration, enabling certificate delivery at DevOps speed. Certificates are provisioned automatically into containerised applications without blocking deployment pipelines. Learn here how to streamline certificate management in Azure Kubernetes Service for cloud-native environments.

Enterprise System Orchestration

Integrate certificate lifecycle management with:

Build Crypto-Agility for the Future

The White House National Security Memorandum 10 (NSM-10) mandates that federal agencies complete their migration to post-quantum cryptography by 2035. When post-quantum algorithms require deployment, automated systems must identify affected certificates, generate replacements, and deploy across environments in hours rather than months. Review NIST’s crypto-agility strategies to prepare your organization for this transition.

TLS Certificate Management Software Comparison

When evaluating certificate lifecycle automation platforms, consider these critical capabilities:

Essential Features

  1. Multi-CA support: Support for multiple certificate authorities to avoid vendor lock-in
  2. Protocol flexibility: ACME, SCEP, EST, and proprietary APIs
  3. Cloud-native architecture: Scalability for millions of certificates
  4. Zero-touch renewal: Fully automated renewal without human intervention
  5. Comprehensive discovery: Agentless scanning across hybrid infrastructure

Integration Requirements

Modern certificate lifecycle automation must integrate seamlessly with your existing technology stack. AppViewX’s integration ecosystem includes:

  • ITSM platforms: ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, Jira Service Management
  • Cloud providers: AWS Certificate Manager, Azure Key Vault, Google Certificate Authority Service
  • DevOps tools: Jenkins, GitLab, Terraform, Ansible
  • Security platforms: Splunk, QRadar, CyberArk

According to Gartner’s latest research, organizations prioritizing integration capabilities achieve 50% faster implementation and 30% lower total cost of ownership.

Measuring Success: KPIs and Metrics

Operational Metrics

Track these key performance indicators to demonstrate automation value:

  • Mean Time to Provision (MTTP): Target <5 minutes from request to deployment
  • Certificate coverage: Aim for 95%+ automated management
  • Renewal success rate: Should exceed 99.9% with proper automation
  • Discovery accuracy: Track percentage of certificates under management
  • Policy compliance: Monitor adherence to security standards

Business Impact Metrics

Quantify automation ROI through:

  • Outage prevention: Number of potential outages avoided
  • Cost avoidance: Calculate savings from prevented incidents
  • Productivity gains: FTE hours redirected to strategic initiatives
  • Audit performance: Reduction in compliance preparation time
  • Security posture: Decrease in certificate-related vulnerabilities

Preparing for Future Requirements

Post-Quantum Readiness

The White House National Security Memorandum 10 mandates federal agencies complete migration to post-quantum cryptography by 2035, with an estimated cost of $7.1 billion. Organisations implementing automation now position themselves for seamless algorithm transitions when NIST’s post-quantum standards become mandatory.

Automation enables crypto-agility through:

  • Centralized algorithm management
  • Rapid certificate replacement capabilities
  • Hybrid certificate support during transition
  • Automated vulnerability scanning and remediation

Container and Kubernetes Automation

According to Red Hat’s 2024 State of Kubernetes Security report, a majority of organizations experienced at least one container or Kubernetes security incident in the last 12 months, with 45% reporting runtime incidents and 44% encountering issues in build and deployment phases. As teams scale their cloud-native environments, these numbers highlight the importance of eliminating manual, error-prone steps, including certificate provisioning and renewal.

This is where automated certificate management becomes critical. AppViewX streamlines this by providing native integration for:

  • Ingress controller certificate management
  • Service mesh TLS automation
  • Pod-to-pod encryption
  • Secrets rotation and management

Best Practices for Implementation Success

Start Small, Scale Fast

  1. Begin with high-risk certificates where automation delivers immediate value
  2. Pilot with 20-30% of portfolio to build confidence and refine processes
  3. Document lessons learned and adjust automation policies
  4. Scale to production once pilot demonstrates success
  5. Achieve full coverage within 6-12 months

Avoid Common Pitfalls

Organizations often struggle with:

  • Incomplete discovery leading to shadow IT certificates
  • Over-complex approval workflows that negate automation benefits
  • Insufficient testing causing production failures
  • Lack of executive sponsorship delaying implementation
  • Treating automation as purely technical rather than business transformation

Build Organizational Capability

Successful automation requires cultural change:

  • Train teams on automation tools and processes
  • Establish clear ownership and accountability
  • Create cross-functional working groups
  • Document procedures and runbooks
  • Celebrate automation wins to build momentum

The Path Forward: Taking Action

The transition to 47-day certificates isn’t a future consideration—it’s an immediate imperative. Organizations implementing certificate lifecycle automation now gain competitive advantages through operational efficiency, enhanced security, and infrastructure resilience.

Immediate Next Steps

  1. Assess your current state using the PKI Consortium’s maturity model
  2. Calculate your ROI potential based on certificate volume and outage history
  3. Evaluate automation platforms against your specific requirements
  4. Start discovery to understand your true certificate footprintBuild your business case with concrete metrics and timelines
  5. Build your business case with concrete metrics and timelines

Why AppViewX for Certificate Lifecycle Automation

AppViewX’s certificate lifecycle automation platform delivers:

  • Comprehensive discovery across hybrid multi-cloud environments
  • Policy-driven automation with zero-touch renewal
  • Enterprise integrations with existing security and IT tools
  • Crypto-agility for post-quantum readiness
  • Proven ROI with customers achieving 70-90% reduction in management overhead across certificate lifecycle operations

Ready to transform your certificate management? Schedule a demo to see how AppViewX can automate your certificate lifecycle, or download our ROI calculator to quantify your automation opportunity

About AppViewX

AppViewX is a global leader in certificate lifecycle automation and machine identity management. Our platform enables enterprises to discover, manage, and automate certificates at scale across complex hybrid multi-cloud environments. With AppViewX, organizations achieve operational excellence while building crypto-agility for future security requirements.

Schedule Your Demo →

Private CA vs Public CA: When to Use

Private CA vs Public CA: When to Use

Uncategorized

Summary:

Use a Public CA when you need certificates for public-facing websites, customer applications, or any service accessed by external users, as public CAs are automatically trusted by all browsers and devices. Use a Private CA when securing internal networks, development environments, IoT devices, or any infrastructure where certificates only need to be trusted within your organization. Most enterprises need both: public CAs for external-facing services and private CAs for internal infrastructure, best managed through a unified certificate lifecycle management platform.

Consider weaving in CA-agnostic capabilities in the setup and conclusion as AppViewX is CA agnostic eliminating the threat of vendor locking.

Key Differences:

Aspect Public CA Private CA
Best For Public websites, customer-facing apps, external APIs Internal networks, DevOps, IoT, employee authentication
Trust Automatic browser/device trust Manual trust deployment required
Cost Model Pay per certificate Setup cost + unlimited issuance
Certificate Transparency Required (public logs) Not required (privacy maintained)
Ideal Volume Low to medium volumes High volume needs (1000+ certificates)
Control Limited customization Full policy control

Understanding Certificate Authorities (CAs): The Foundation of PKI

What is a Public Certificate Authority?

A Public Certificate Authority (CA) is a trusted third-party organization that issues SSL/TLS certificates for websites and applications accessible on the public internet. Public CAs are recognized and trusted by all major browsers and operating systems.

When you purchase an TLS certificate for your public-facing website, you’re obtaining it from a public CA that has been vetted and included in browser trust stores. These certificates enable the HTTPS connections users see when visiting secure websites.

What is a Private Certificate Authority?

Organizations often need to secure their internal infrastructure, applications, and users with digital certificates. When an organization establishes the capability to issue these certificates internally, it becomes a Private Certificate Authority. Private CA creates certificates that are only trusted within the organization’s own environment.

Which type of CA is right for your organization

The decision between Private CA and Public CA isn’t about choosing the “best” solution, it’s about matching your certificate infrastructure to your organization’s specific needs, scale, and growth trajectory. With the PKI market projected to reach USD 24.37 billion by 2032, growing at 20.1% annually, and Cloud/Managed PKI solutions expanding at 21.3% CAGR, you’re making this decision in a landscape where automation and scalability are no longer optional, they’re business necessities and competitive advantages.

Your path forward starts with understanding where certificates fit in your architecture today and where they need to take you tomorrow. Organizations currently manage thousands of internal certificates, yet still rely on spreadsheets for tracking. If that sounds familiar, you’re not behind, you’re at the perfect inflection point to build a certificate strategy that scales with your business rather than against it.

Public CA makes sense when you need immediate, universal trust. If your certificates protect customer-facing websites, e-commerce platforms, or services that external parties must validate, Public CA ensures trust through pre-installed root certificates in browsers and operating systems.

Private CA unlocks flexibility and scale for internal operations. When you’re securing internal applications, service-to-service communication, VPN access, or IoT device authentication, Private CA lets you define your own certificate policies, validity periods, and issuance workflows.

Automation for Public and Private CAs

The shift to automated certificate lifecycle management isn’t just about keeping pace with industry changes, it’s about positioning your organization to move faster and maintain digital trust. With recent CA/Browser Forum changes and a timeline that leads to 47-day certificate validity by March 2029 and machine identities growing 20 times faster than human identities, the organizations that automate today gain operational agility that compounds over time.

AVX ONE accelerates your automation journey. AppViewX helps companies manage their Certificate Authorities (CAs) by providing powerful certificate lifecycle management (CLM) solutions that automate, unify, and secure certificate operations across both public and private CAs in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Rather than building custom integrations or managing multiple point solutions, it provides enterprise-grade certificate lifecycle automation that delivers results from day one.

The platform discovers certificates across your entire infrastructure regardless of issuer, automates end-to-end workflows from CSR (Certificate Signing Request) generation through deployment, and provides unified visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Schedule Your Demo →

AppViewX Policy Engine: Automate CLM Policies and Accelerate Time-to-Value

AppViewX Policy Engine: Automate CLM Policies and Accelerate Time-to-Value

Uncategorized

For most organizations, Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) is still a tangled web of spreadsheets, manual request tickets, and last-minute fire drills when a certificate expires and takes down a critical production service. Every team, from DevOps to Marketing, needs certificates to keep their applications and services running, but getting a single certificate issued often means opening an ITSM ticket, waiting on approvals, and enduring several back-and-forth interactions.

This friction isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s a problem that traditional CLM tools, which often act as little more than expensive databases, have failed to solve.

And even when organizations invest in a CLM platform, implementations are rarely quick wins. Deployments can take months, bogged down by complex configurations, custom scripting, and heavy reliance on professional services.

The biggest bottleneck is policy definition. Every organization needs clear rules for how certificates are issued, renewed, and deployed across hybrid environments. But defining and enforcing those policies consistently has long been one of the hardest parts of CLM—until now.

Introducing the AppViewX Policy Engine.

Shift to an Automated Self-Service Model with AppViewX Policy Engine

The new AppViewX Policy Engine is built on self-service automation, making it the easiest and fastest way to automate policy workflows and deliver value from day one. It templatizes common CLM workflows into a library of ready-to-use “trust templates,” allowing teams to move from static, ticket-based processes to dynamic, automated policy enforcement—no scripting required.

For new customers, the impact is immediate: instead of spending months scripting and configuring workflows, teams can apply pre-built (or easily configured) policies on day one. This isn’t just a new feature; it’s a fundamental shift in how we approach certificate lifecycle management.

Highlights:

  • Automated Enrollment: Requesting a certificate no longer means filling out long forms or creating tickets. With Automated Enrollment, users simply submit the essential details through an intuitive self-service form. Approvers are automatically notified, and once approved, the system issues and delivers the certificate—no manual intervention, no delays, no friction.

    Instead of brittle, step-by-step custom automation scripts, Policy Engine uses a declarative, “intent-based” model. You don’t build a complex, 20-step workflow for a single task, you define a policy.

    For example, a “Web Server” certificate policy might specify:

    “All web server certificates must be 2048-bit, valid for 1 year, sourced from this CA, and automatically re-enrolled with a new private key 30 days before expiration.”

    Standard organization address and other details are auto-filled. The customer IT team only needs to specify the common name in a self-service form. From there, the system automatically generates the certificate, routes it through the necessary approvals, and delivers it to the requester—no manual steps, no back-and-forth.

    You are no longer building a process. You are defining a rule. The “how” becomes automated, consistent, and most importantly, auditable, while removing bottlenecks and freeing up resources for the Network and PKI teams that manage the CLM process.

  • Policy-Driven Re-enrolment (with New Key Generation): This is critical. A simple renewal that reuses the same private key isn’t real security; it’s a risk disguised as convenience. The Policy Engine enforces best practices automatically, ensuring every certificate renewal generates a new key pair. This ensures cryptographic hygiene, reducing the risk of key compromise.
  • Automated Device Onboarding: For network teams managing hybrid and cloud-native environments, this is the game-changer. New devices can be securely and automatically onboarded to enable better certificate discovery and provisioning through last-mile automation.

Improve User Experience with InfinityAIReady-to-use templates for common CLM actions

The Policy Engine Advantage

  • Faster Time-to-Value: Pre-built templates and automated workflows get teams up and running immediately, reducing deployment and configuration time from months to days or hours.
  • Self-Service Simplicity: Empowers teams to request and issue certificates on their own, without waiting for support from the IT team, reducing bottlenecks and accelerating operations.
  • Configurable for All Environments: Flexibility to tailor policies to meet the needs of hybrid, multi-cloud, or complex enterprise setups while maintaining consistency and compliance.
  • Easier Renewals: Automated certificate re-enrollment ensures seamless, friction-free renewals, reducing risk and administrative overhead.
  • Supports Every Use Case: Whether your goal is quick wins with ready-to-use templates or advanced, policy-driven automation, Policy Engine scales to meet your requirements.

Core Capabilities of Policy Engine

Feature What It Delivers Why It Matters
Predefined Policies Out-of-the-box configurations for the most common CLM use cases. Enables rapid, self-service onboarding with zero friction.
Admin Configurable Templates Define enrollment behavior and self-service UI for delegated access. Meets growing certificate demands across teams while maintaining control and consistency.
Central Policy Governance Unified policy management across all certificate groups. Ensures consistency, compliance, and repeatability across teams and business units.

How Can I Get This?

Policy Engine is automatically available for all on-prem and SaaS AVX ONE CLM customers as part of AppViewX’s November 2025 release. With Policy Engine, AppViewX customers can deploy CLM at the speed of business, accelerating automation, improving compliance, and freeing IT and security teams to focus on innovation rather than configuration.

If you are new to AppViewX, then contact us to see how Policy Engine can eliminate manual chaos and bring order, consistency, and speed to every stage of certificate lifecycle management.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

  1. What is AppViewX Policy Engine and how does it help with CLM?

    AppViewX Policy Engine is a self-service, policy-driven automation framework within AVX ONE CLM. It simplifies certificate issuance, renewal, and governance by replacing manual processes with automated, auditable workflows, reducing friction, errors, and operational overhead.

  2. How quickly can organizations deploy CLM using Policy Engine?

    With pre-built policy templates for common certificate workflows, organizations can deploy CLM in hours / days instead of months. With pre-built templates for common certificate workflows, teams can get started immediately, while still having access to advanced visual workflow customization for complex environments.

  3. How does Policy Engine simplify certificate requests and approvals?

    Policy Engine introduces self-service enrollment with pre-defined forms that capture only essential details. Once submitted, requests automatically route through approval workflows and deliver certificates, eliminating the need for tickets, manual steps, or back-and-forth communication.

  4. How can automation simplify certificate deployment to servers and devices?

    Automation allows certificates to be securely pushed to endpoints with preconfigured key formats and restart settings, minimizing downtime and ensuring trust consistency across the network.

November 2025 Product Release: From 47-Day Mandates to Post Quantum Readiness

November 2025 Product Release: From 47-Day Mandates to Post Quantum Readiness

Uncategorized

As enterprises face growing pressure to secure machine identities, the landscape is shifting rapidly. The post-quantum era is approaching, with NIST’s impending cryptography standards forcing organizations to rethink how they safeguard digital assets. At the same time, the CA/B Forum’s new 47-day certificate mandates will dramatically shorten certificate lifecycles, exposing the limits of manual management. These shifts, coupled with the general increase in digital assets and expanding attack surface, are creating significant pain points for security and IT teams.

With our November 2025 release, AppViewX delivers a major leap forward. We are helping customers prepare for the future by accelerating deployment, automating compliance, and reducing operational overhead across every part of certificate lifecycle management (CLM).

This release introduces four innovations designed to help teams work faster, smarter, and more securely:

  • Manage Short-Lived Certificates at Scale: Meet the 47-day mandate by automating certificate renewal cycles and enforcing re-enrollment policies without added overhead.
  • Accelerate Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Readiness with Quantum Trust Hub: Assess your crypto-agility across source code, apps, certificates, databases, containers, and more with a complete Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM) and remediation recommendations.
  • Improve User Experience with AppViewX InfinityAI: Rapidly navigate to the data you need, generate reports with natural language queries and accelerate onboarding through AI-based navigation.
  • Achieve Faster Time-to-Value with Policy Engine: Deploy CLM in days—not months—with out-of-the-box policy templates, while retaining the flexibility to customize workflows for complex environments.

Together, these features empower Security, DevOps, and IT teams to reduce manual effort, increase compliance, and get ahead of the industry’s most pressing changes.

Short-Lived Certificate Management: Automate Compliance, Eliminate Risk

The CA/B Forum’s upcoming 47-day certificate lifecycle mandate will increase renewal frequency by up to eight times by 2029, with the first phase of reduced certificate validity (200 days) starting in March 2026. The new Short-Lived Certificate Management capabilities in AVX ONE are purpose-built to automate compliance and eliminate overhead.

Capabilities include:

  • Automated Onboarding and Discovery: Instantly detect and onboard endpoints (servers, network devices, IoT, etc.) for streamlined certificate provisioning.
  • Automated Domain Control Validation (DCV): Meet 47-day compliance by validating domains and issuing renewals automatically—no manual effort required.
  • Certificate Lifecycle and Validity Enhancements: Define new certificate validity for renewals, generate new private keys, and use templated re-enrollment policies for consistent compliance.

By automating discovery, validation, and renewal, organizations can mitigate outages, reduce human error, and maintain compliance with shorter certificate validity timelines with minimal overhead.

Key benefits:

  • Continuous compliance with CA/Browser Forum mandates.
  • Fewer outages, security breaches, and compliance gaps.
  • Reduced operational overhead through automation and visibility.

See how to automate 47-day certificate compliance →

Quantum Trust Hub: Prepare for the Post Quantum Cryptography Era

The rise of quantum computing presents an existential challenge to today’s encryption standards. With NIST’s release of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms, security leaders are now under pressure to assess and plan their migration to quantum-safe cryptography before it’s too late.

The new Quantum Trust Hub helps organizations assess, prioritize, and plan their migration to quantum-safe encryption.

Capabilities include:

  • Enterprise Assessment & Remediation: Get a comprehensive assessment of certificates, algorithms, protocols, libraries, and keys—complete with a Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM) and remediation recommendations.
  • Comprehensive Reporting: Generate a full-featured report that assesses your crypto-agility across source code, apps, certificates, databases, containers, and more.
  • Dashboard Insights: Consolidate data and insights into one view, enabling leadership to make informed, strategic decisions on crypto posture across the organization.

With a unified view of cryptographic assets and vulnerabilities, teams can confidently plan and prioritize their path to quantum-safe encryption.

Key benefits:

  • Understand your crypto-readiness instantly with clear vulnerability counts and remediation guidance.
  • Adapt to new standards published by NIST, NCSC, and other regulatory agencies.
  • Demonstrate security leadership and meet compliance requirements.

Learn more about assessing your PQC readiness →

InfinityAI: Reduce Operational Costs with AI-Enabled Search and Navigation

As platforms grow more powerful, they also require greater expertise to navigate. Finding data or building reports often takes time and requires help from support teams. InfinityAI changes that experience. Integrated across help, search, navigation, and reporting, it allows users to ask for what they need in plain language—whether it’s building a report, finding a configuration page, or troubleshooting an issue.

Capabilities include:

  • AI-Enabled Navigation: Allows users to navigate by simply stating what they need to do, for example “rotate a certificate” or “add a new device group”.
  • Natural Language Search and Reporting: Quickly search or build custom reports by using AI-enabled prompts.
  • Intelligent Knowledge Base: Find answers to product-related questions using a simple, conversational
    interface.

The outcome is a more intelligent user experience that turns complex operations into effortless actions.

Key benefits:

  • Context-aware guidance reduces onboarding, learning curves and improves user experience.
  • Any user can now self-serve insights without relying on internal support teams, increasing overall efficiency.
  • A common AI interface that extends across the AVX ONE SaaS platform.

Discover how InfinityAI transforms CLM operations →

Policy Engine: Faster Time to Value, No Complexity

Getting value from a CLM platform shouldn’t take months. Yet traditional systems often require extensive configuration and a service engagement before teams see results.

With the new Policy Engine, AVX ONE delivers an out-of-the-box onboarding experience that dramatically accelerates time to value. Customers can now use predefined policies that cover the most common CLM use cases, as well as customize policies and workflows for more complex configurations.

Capabilities include:

  • Pre-defined policy templates: Leverage templates for common use cases to onboard faster while retaining the option to use visual workflows for more complex custom use cases.
  • Automated device onboarding: Detect and onboard devices automatically, enabling faster discovery and provisioning of certificates.
  • Admin configurable template options: Define enrollment behavior and UI for delegated access to meet increased certificate needs across teams.

This flexibility reduces deployment and configuration time from months to days.

Key benefits:

  • Faster time to value through simplified, self-service deployment.
  • Streamlined certificate re-enrollment minimizes friction during renewal processes.
  • Flexibility to tailor policies for unique enterprise environments.

Learn more about Policy Engine →

Delivering Continuous Innovation

The AVX ONE November 2025 release delivers a major leap forward in helping customers future-proof their machine identity ecosystems while dramatically simplifying deployment, operations, and user experience. This release introduces faster implementation, intelligent automation, instant certificate discoverability, and built-in compliance enforcement—all powered by PQC-ready cryptography and guided workflows that reduce complexity and risk.

By unifying speed, security, and simplicity into a single platform experience, AppViewX is enabling customers to stay ahead of emerging threats, adapt to evolving standards, and scale trust across every machine identity.

The release is now available. Find full release notes and resources on the Product Release Hub or contact your customer success team for questions. You can also download Product datasheet to learn more.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Does the Certificate Lifecycle Management automation support both public and private CAs?

    Yes. AVX ONE supports all major public and private CAs and can automate renewals across hybrid environments.

  2. How do I get InfinityAI?

    InfinityAI can be turned on by your Admin if you are a SaaS-delivered CLM customer. Permissions to access the feature are defined by role.

  3. Does InfinityAI store / send customer data outside of the AVX ONE platform?

    No. Customer specific data is not sent outside of the platform or provided as an input to external LLMs.

What is Table Stakes for Certificate Lifecycle Management in 2026

What is Table Stakes for Certificate Lifecycle Management in 2026

Uncategorized

Summary:

Enterprise-class Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) software must provide these features at a minimum: continuous discovery to scan all environments, central repository for unified certificate inventory, automated enrollment and renewal via ACME protocol, policy enforcement for cryptographic standards, continuous monitoring with predictive alerts, automated rotation before expiration, and reporting dashboards for compliance metrics.

Certificate lifecycle management software provides the automated control organizations need for comprehensive certificate and PKI ecosystem management.

Table Stakes Capabilities for Enterprise CLM Software

To effectively manage digital certificates at enterprise scale, your CLM solution must deliver specific core capabilities. These foundational features separate basic certificate tracking from comprehensive lifecycle automation.

The table below outlines the critical capabilities every enterprise CLM platform should provide, along with why each matters and how it performs in practice.

Capability Critical Importance Performance Requirements
Continuous Discovery Eliminates blind spots across multi-cloud environments Automated, agent-less certificate discovery with continuous scanning and intelligent tagging for renewal workflows
Centralized Repository Essential for visibility and governance Unified certificate inventory consolidating metadata, cryptographic algorithms, and expiration tracking
Automated Enrollment Reduces manual CA requests Integration with ACME protocol for automated certificate issuance and renewal workflows
Policy Enforcement Ensures consistency and compliance Framework for approved CA usage and lifecycle governance with automated policy validation
Continuous Monitoring Enables proactive management Predictive alerting system tracking certificate status across all lifecycle stages
Automated Renewal Minimizes manual intervention Systematic renewal workflows triggered before expiration with zero-touch rotation capability
Reporting Dashboard Provides compliance visibility Analytics dashboards tracking KPIs like crypto resilience scorecards for audit readiness

Manual Processes vs. CLM Automation

The gap between traditional manual certificate management and modern CLM automation is substantial.

Organizations still relying on spreadsheets, manual tracking, and fragmented processes face significantly higher operational costs, security risks, and outage frequency.

This comparison illustrates how automation transforms each critical stage of certificate management.

Process Stage Traditional Management CLM Automation
Discovery Manual spreadsheet audits Continuous agent-less monitoring across all environments
Renewal Tracking Inefficient manual checks Automated notification alerts with zero-touch renewal workflows
Revocation Management Error-prone with delayed response Instant policy-driven revocation with complete audit log visibility
Compliance Reporting Time-intensive manual data collection Dynamic dashboards with automated compliance-ready reporting
Kubernetes Integration Custom scripts with manual dependencies Native integration enabling certificate delivery at DevOps speed
Crypto Agility Reactive certificate replacement Proactive policy-driven cryptographic transitions ensuring compliance

How AppViewX AVX ONE Leads the CLM Industry

AppViewX AVX ONE represents the next generation of certificate lifecycle management, delivering comprehensive automation and intelligence that traditional approaches cannot match.

Here’s how AVX ONE compares to conventional CLM platforms.

Capability Traditional CLM AppViewX AVX ONE
Discovery Often manual with incomplete visibility 100% automated continuous discovery across all environments including containerized systems
Policy Enforcement Manual, error-prone processes Real-time policy enforcement with automated violation alerts
Renewal & Rotation Scheduled renewals vulnerable to lapses Intelligent incident-driven automation preventing outages
Compliance Reporting Static, outdated templates Dynamic crypto resilience scorecard with audit-ready dashboards
Machine Identity Security Primarily TLS-focused Comprehensive protection for all machine identities with automated threat detection
Scalability Static, limited architecture Flexible design supporting millions of certificates across hybrid and multi-cloud environments

Outlook: The 47-Day SSL/TLS Reality

The progressive reduction in SSL/TLS certificate validity represents a fundamental shift in digital trust management. Organizations must prioritize proactive automation and unified certificate governance to avoid certificate outages.

Ready to strengthen your digital trust? Let our experts demonstrate how AppViewX AVX ONE automates and fortifies your certificate lifecycle processes.

Optimal CLM Strategy

Effective certificate management demands rigorous compliance practices. Key elements include:

  1. Unified Certificate Inventory: Maintain a structured repository tracking certificate quantities, locations, and expiration dates.
  2. Proactive Renewal Systems: Implement automated alerts and renewal workflows to prevent expiration-related outages.
  3. Strong Cryptography: Enforce consistent cryptographic policies to eliminate configuration vulnerabilities.
  4. Secure Key Storage: Protect private keys in hardened repositories, misconfigured keys pose severe enterprise risks.

Future Trends & Final Thoughts

The CA/Browser forum’s mandate reducing TLS certificate lifetime from 398 days to 47 days by 2029 fundamentally changes operational requirements. This dramatically increases renewal workload, demanding that CLM solutions provide:

Certificate Visibility

In a 47-day TLS environment, enhanced certificate visibility directly correlates with scalability and operational resilience.

Enhanced Automation

Shortened lifecycles require automated systems that ensure consistent, rapid renewals with minimal error rates.

Ongoing Policy Control

Frequent renewals demand robust control systems preventing accountability gaps and ensuring continuous policy enforcement.

Critical Takeaway: Without proper visibility, organizations will fail to renew critical certificates. Comprehensive automation is essential, not just for managing end-to-end certificate processes, but for eliminating operational inefficiencies in certificate management.

Contact us to explore AVX ONE’s advanced certificate lifecycle management capabilities in detail.

Schedule Your Demo →

How to Reduce SSL and TLS Outages

How to Reduce SSL and TLS Outages

Uncategorized

Summary:

  • Reduce SSL outages by: (1) Discovering and cataloging all certificates across your entire infrastructure automatically (2) Implementing automated certificate renewal and provisioning to eliminate manual errors, (3) Setting up multi-stage expiration alerts and automated workflows, and (4) Maintaining complete certificate inventory visibility through automated discovery tools. Organizations using certificate lifecycle management platforms like AppViewX to eliminate certificate-related downtime completely.
  • SSL outages are a preventable problem. Organizations that implement automated certificate lifecycle management to eliminate outage incidents like PacificSource did in their recently publicized automation initiative.
  • Enterprises should implement complete certificate visibility, continuous monitoring and automated policy-based renewals.
  • With certificate lifespans decreasing to 47 days by 2029 (CA/Browser Forum Ballot SC-081v3), enterprises managing thousands of certificates across hybrid environments face an impossible task. Manual tracking inevitably leads to missed expirations that trigger outages in critical applications and APIs, often at the worst possible moment.

Considering it takes at least 5 hours to remediate a certificate-related outage, reduction in the incident numbers of outages should be a top priority for any enterprise.

In this guide, we’ll dive into the root causes of SSL or TLS certificate outages, proven strategies to prevent expiration-related downtime, best practices for automated monitoring and renewal, and how to build a resilient certificate management system that scales with your infrastructure.

What are SSL outages and why do they matter?

An SSL or TLS certificate outage occurs when a digital certificate fails, preventing secure encrypted connections between users and your applications. When certificates expire, are misconfigured, or become invalid, browsers display security warnings, APIs reject connections, and critical services become inaccessible and damage trust.

What users may experience:

  • Red warning screens stating “Your connection is not private”
  • Blocked access to websites and applications
  • Failed API calls and broken integrations
  • Crashed mobile app

common triggers of certificate outages

Common triggers include:

  • Expired certificates, leading cause of certificate-related outages, accounting for 81% of outages organizations in the past year
  • Installation errors, including misconfigured certificates or incorrect server settings
  • Domain mismatches in which the certificate doesn’t match the domain name being accessed
  • Broken certificate chains with missing or incorrect intermediate certificates
  • Certificate revocations due to compromised or invalidated certificates

How can you prevent SSL certificate expiration?

It is important to understand why manual certificate tracking fails at scale for enterprises. There was once a time when certificates had a 3 year expiration date. In those days, it was feasible to do manual certificate tracking and renewals.

However, as organizations manage thousands of certificates and certificate visibility remains low (up to 64% of organizations are unaware of the number of certificates deployed), enterprises are not ready for the upcoming 47-day expiration mandate. Manual tracking and remediation is a challenge now and will become unfeasible in the next year, becoming a recipe for outages and lost revenue.

Implementing automated certificate renewal and provisioning

Certificate lifecycle automation eliminates manual bottlenecks that cause outages. Modern platforms monitor expiration dates and trigger renewal workflows at configurable thresholds (30/60/90 days), then automatically:

  1. Reuse existing keys or generate certificate signing requests (CSRs)
  2. Submit to the appropriate Certificate Authority
  3. Validate domain ownership
  4. Retrieve and deploy issued certificates
  5. Verify installation and log all actions

Key automation capabilities:

ACME Protocol Integration: The Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol enables zero-touch certificate issuance, automated domain validation, and seamless integration with Let’s Encrypt and commercial CAs.

Multi-CA Support: Enterprise solutions integrate with multiple Certificate Authorities, both public and private PKI, allowing flexible CA routing and migration without service disruption.

Self-Service Provisioning: DevOps and application teams can request certificates via self-service portals or APIs while security maintains policy control, reducing IT bottlenecks and ensuring compliance.

The impact: Organizations implementing automation reduce manual certificate work by up to 90% and cut certificate-related downtime from 20-30 hours per year to under 2 hours.

impact of certificate automation

How does AppViewX eliminate certificate blind spots?

AppViewX is a comprehensive certificate lifecycle management platform designed to eliminate the visibility gaps and manual processes that cause outages.

Complete infrastructure discovery:

AVX ONE automatically discovers certificates across 100+ platforms and technologies, including:

  • Public and private cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)
  • Load balancers (F5, Citrix ADC, A10, Kemp
  • Web servers and application servers
  • Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms
  • API gateways and service meshes

Unlike point solutions that require agents or complex integrations, AppViewX uses agentless discovery to provide immediate visibility without infrastructure changes.

Challenge How AppViewX Solves It Business Impact
Certificate blind spots Automated discovery across 100+ platforms with centralized dashboard Complete visibility into certificate inventory
Manual renewal processes Automated policy-based workflows with multi-stage alerts (30/60/90 days) 97% reduction in manual certificate tasks
Certificate-related outages Zero-touch renewals and automated deployment and application binding  Elimination of certificate outages
CA vendor lock-in Multi-CA orchestration (public + private PKI) Vendor flexibility and seamless migration
DevOps bottlenecks Self-service portal with policy enforcement Faster certificate deployments without compromising security
Future cryptographic changes Bulk replacement and algorithm migration capabilities Ready for 47-day lifespans and post-quantum cryptography

Stop certificate outages before they blindside you

Don’t wait for the next $5,600-per-minute outage or 47-day certificate lifespan mandates to realize your certificate management needs automation.

See how AppViewX helps enterprises:

  • Eliminate certificate-related outages
  • Reduce manual certificate work by 97%
  • Gain complete visibility across 100+ platforms
  • Automate renewals with zero-touch workflows
  • Prepare for post-quantum cryptography

Get a personalized demo and see how AppViewX can transform your certificate operations from reactive firefighting to proactive automation.

Schedule Your Demo →

 

Frequently asked questions (FAQs):

What causes most SSL certificate outages?

Expired certificates cause the majority of SSL outages, with most organizations experiencing at least one certificate-related outage in the past year. Other common causes include misconfigured certificates during installation, domain name mismatches, broken certificate chains, and lack of visibility into certificate inventory.

Can SSL certificate management be automated?

Yes, SSL certificate management can and must be automated, especially as certificate lifespans shrink to 47-day intervals by 2029 and exponentially increase the workload associated with monitoring and managing them. Certificate lifecycle management automation platforms do the heavy lifting of keeping an always current inventory of certificates, flagging pending expirations, automating renewals, provisioning, and monitoring across an entire IT infrastructure.