best practices

The move toward 90‑day TLS/SSL certificates is accelerating the need for certificate automation across enterprise environments. As organizations manage thousands of certificates and face increasingly frequent renewal cycles, manual certificate management is becoming impractical, costly and prone to error. Shorter certificate lifespans are intended to improve security and reduce risks associated with outdated issuance processes, but they also place significant operational demands on IT teams responsible for maintaining certificate availability and compliance. Certificate automation, particularly through the ACME protocol, addresses these challenges by automatically provisioning, validating, installing and renewing certificates without human intervention. Automation reduces outages caused by expired certificates, minimizes human error, improves operational efficiency and allows organizations to scale certificate management alongside business growth. By adopting automated certificate lifecycle management and cloud-based PKI solutions, enterprises can adapt to changing certificate validity requirements while improving security, simplifying operations and maintaining reliable digital services.

Organizations entering 2024 face the same relentless security pressures—even as budgets tighten and skilled PKI talent remains scarce. Many enterprises still manage PKI with overstretched IT teams, manual processes and limited visibility, making certificate lifecycle management increasingly risky. HID PKI‑as‑a‑Service (PKIaaS) addresses these challenges with predictable subscription‑based pricing, eliminating the hidden costs and scaling penalties common in per‑certificate models. Customers gain white‑glove support from PKI experts, centralized certificate visibility through the Account Certificate Manager (ACM), and fully automated certificate provisioning using connector‑based protocols like ACME, SCEP and EST. HID’s approach requires no agents, minimizes operational overhead and accelerates migrations from existing CAs—often in days. With no hidden fees, flexible hierarchy options and programs that ensure organizations retain ownership of private root keys, HID PKIaaS delivers stable, scalable and simplified PKI management even during economic uncertainty.

Financial institutions are increasingly shifting PKI to the cloud as the complexity, scale and cost of managing on‑premises certificate infrastructures become unsustainable. While PKI remains the core technology for authenticating users, devices and applications, organizations often struggle with issuing, renewing and monitoring tens of thousands of certificates. Cloud-based PKIaaS removes this burden by offering fast deployment, simplified management and predictable pricing through a managed SaaS model. PKIaaS enhances speed, agility, security and compliance while supporting Zero Trust architectures and securing remote work, virtual desktops and machine-to-machine communication. Highly regulated industries can maintain control by using hybrid models that keep private root keys onsite while leveraging cloud management. HID’s PKIaaS exemplifies this approach, giving institutions strong security without the operational overhead, ultimately improving trust and resilience in an industry with elevated breach risk.

Managing TLS/SSL certificates has become increasingly challenging as certificate volumes continue to grow and certificate lifespans continue to shrink. The ACME (Automated Certificate Management Environment) protocol was developed to automate certificate lifecycle management, enabling organizations to request, issue, renew and revoke certificates without manual intervention. Originally created for Let’s Encrypt and later standardized by the IETF, ACME helps eliminate the operational burden of managing web server certificates while reducing the risk of outages caused by expired certificates. ACME works through lightweight clients installed on web servers that automatically handle certificate provisioning and renewal. HID’s PKI‑as‑a‑Service extends these capabilities by supporting open-source ACME clients, pre-verifying domains, simplifying deployment and enabling organizations to automate certificate management across both public and private PKI environments. By combining automation with cloud-based PKI services, organizations can improve security, reduce administrative effort, maintain control of trusted assets and scale certificate operations efficiently as infrastructure grows.

PKI automation is becoming essential as certificate volumes grow and TLS/SSL lifespans shrink. Enterprises now manage rapidly increasing numbers of certificates, making manual processes unsustainable and risky. The ACME protocol was created to automate certificate issuance, renewal and revocation for web servers, eliminating the need for human intervention and significantly reducing outages caused by expired certificates. ACMEv2, the current standard, enables seamless domain validation and certificate deployment through lightweight clients that integrate directly with server environments. When combined with HID’s cloud-based PKI‑as‑a‑Service, ACME supports scalable, simplified certificate lifecycle management without requiring proprietary agents or new infrastructure. HID’s connector‑based automation model leverages existing utilities and enterprise tools to automate certificate operations across diverse environments. This reduces costs, strengthens security and ensures organizations can keep pace with shorter certificate lifetimes and expanding operational demands.

Zero Trust security is built on the principle that no user, device or system should be trusted by default, regardless of whether it is inside or outside the network perimeter. Implementing this model requires a strong foundation of trusted digital identities, making Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and digital certificates essential components of a successful Zero Trust strategy. By leveraging TLS and certificate-based authentication, organizations can establish trusted identities, encrypt communications and verify every device and system interaction across the enterprise. Digital certificates help secure a wide range of assets, including network equipment, mobile devices, servers, workstations, VPNs, Wi‑Fi networks and IoT devices. This enables organizations to prevent unauthorized access, reduce the risk of impersonation attacks and strengthen machine-to-machine trust regardless of location. As certificate volumes continue to grow and lifespans shorten, many enterprises are adopting managed PKI-as-a-Service (PKIaaS) solutions to automate certificate lifecycle management. Centralized PKI management simplifies enrollment, issuance, renewal and revocation while reducing operational complexity and supporting scalable Zero Trust adoption.