Roberto Popolizio
Updated on: July 31, 2025
Are you sure you don’t have any SSL/TLS certificates expiring while you’re on holiday?
As a SafetyDetective who never really goes on vacation (😢), I went on the lookout for help to avoid your summer holiday being interrupted.
Luckily I found it fromJacob Højmark, a seasoned cybersecurity expert and CEO at TRUSTZONE, Scandinavia’s largest vendor of SSL certificate and TLS certificates. (link in our sources list). He wrote a simple (and free) step-by-step guide, to which I added inputs from our network of expert contributors.
The result is the perfect summer read with the alarming statistics surrounding SSL/TLS certificate outages and the steps businesses must take to avoid being hit by certificate-related incidents.
A Silent Summer Threat
According to CyberArk’s 2025 State of Machine Identity Security Report, 72% of organizations experienced at least one certificate-related outage in the past year. A silent threat that not only disrupts operations but also compromises customer trust and digital security.
And as summer vacation season peaks, many IT teams may not realize their next downtime disaster is ticking toward expiration.
The Business Risk Behind Certificate Expiration
SSL/TLS certificates, the cryptographic backbone of internet trust, are often overlooked until it’s too late. Despite their critical role in securing digital communications, they’re regularly allowed to expire unnoticed. The consequences can be severe: system outages, customer lockout, reputation damage, and even financial loss.
Gaps in Visibility and Lifecycle Management
Beyond downtime and customer trust issues, expired certificates can also trigger compliance violations with frameworks like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or NIS2, risking regulatory fines and legal exposure.
CyberArk’s latest findings confirm the scope of the issue: nearly three-quarters of businesses faced certificate-related outages in the past 12 months, while visibility gaps and management inefficiencies remain widespread, and over half admit they don’t even know how many certificates they manage.
The increased turnover from shorter certificate lifespans (now capped at 13 months) only heightens the urgency.
And yet, many companies still lack proper visibility or automation, relying on spreadsheets or legacy tools that fail to track certificates in real-time. With digital infrastructure under more scrutiny than ever, certificate mismanagement isn’t just an IT issue, it’s a systemic business risk. Many businesses underestimate the complexity of internal certificate management. Certificates are not just for websites . they secure everything from Kubernetes clusters to machine-to-machine API traffic, and these internal certs often lack centralized oversight.
This is especially true during holiday periods.
The Summer Blind Spot: Certificate Expiry During Holidays
When security teams are offline and auto-renewals are misconfigured, the timing of certificate expiry can be catastrophic.
To prevent these failures, SafetyDetective recommends enabling certificate expiration alerts in SIEM tools like Splunk or Microsoft Sentinel, integrating discovery platforms like Venafi, AppViewX, or Keyfactor, and ensuring visibility through a centralized certificate dashboard. These practices not only enhance uptime but also safeguard against breaches and regulatory penalties.. Automation can also be embedded in CI/CD pipelines to enforce rotation policies. For added resilience, using short-lived certificates with automated issuance via ACME (e.g., Let’s Encrypt or HashiCorp Vault) is a best-practice approach.
Certificate-related outages are avoidable, yet they continue to plague businesses, often because they treat SSL/TLS management as a set-and-forget task. There’s a shift in awareness, but without a CA-agnostic, fully visible and accountable system in place, the risk persists, particularly during off-peak staffing periods like summer vacations. CA-agnostic platforms such as Keyfactor Command, Venafi Control Plane, DigiCert Trust Lifecycle Manager, or open-source options like Cert-Manager for Kubernetes, offer businesses the proactive control they need to ensure uninterrupted service — a critical element of any strong security hygiene protocol, which SafetyDetective has long championed.
Supporting Research and Sources
- Keyfactor x Ponemon: https://www.keyfactor.com/resources/state-of-machine-identity-management-report/
- Gartner: “By 2025, 50% of certificate outages will stem from lack of automation.”
- Google / CA/Browser Forum: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/root-ca-policy/
