SSL/TLS certificate validity has already dropped to 200 days, and the industry is heading to 47-day certificates. Shorter certificate lifespans improve security, but they also multiply the workload for every IT, security and PKI team.
Consider the math. If you manage 1,000 certificates, a 47-day validity period means roughly 7,800 renewals a year, compared to about 900 under the old 398-day rule. Manual certificate management simply does not scale to that.
The real risk: certificate expiry and outages
Spreadsheets, calendar reminders and shared inboxes were never built for this pace. Every manual renewal is a chance for an expired certificate, a failed deployment, or unplanned downtime. When a certificate expires unnoticed, your customers usually find out before your team does.
Ask yourself:
Are certificate renewals still handled manually?
Have you automated certificate discovery, issuance, renewal and rotation?
Does your team have the bandwidth to keep up as validity periods keep shrinking?
If the answer to any of these is no, certificate automation needs to be a priority now.
Why certificate lifecycle management (CLM) matters
Certificate lifecycle management gives you one place to discover, issue, renew, deploy and revoke every public and private certificate across your environment. A modern CLM platform delivers:
Complete certificate discovery and inventory across cloud, on-prem and DevOps pipelines
Automated certificate renewal and rotation with no manual steps
Policy enforcement and compliance visibility
Expiry monitoring and alerts that prevent outages
Crypto-agility, so you can adapt quickly to future changes in certificate standards
Managed certificate automation: Like Minds + DigiCert
Buying a tool is only half the job. Someone still has to deploy it, integrate it and run it. That is where Like Minds Consulting comes in.
Like Minds has partnered with DigiCert to deliver certificate lifecycle management as a managed service, built on DigiCert Trust Lifecycle Manager. We handle:
Implementation: deployment and configuration of DigiCert Trust Lifecycle Manager
Integration: connecting your CAs, servers, load balancers, cloud platforms and DevOps tooling
Managed automation: ongoing operation, monitoring and renewal, so nothing expires unnoticed
The result is a resilient certificate management process that works at 200 days and is ready for 100 and 47 days. Your engineers stop chasing certificates and go back to projects that matter.
Stop renewing manually. Start automating.
If your team manages hundreds or thousands of certificates, now is the time to stress-test your renewal process.