The shortage of cybersecurity professionals is more than a hiring headache. Yes, it takes considerable time and effort to secure the best and brightest – but not having enough cybersecurity staff is as much a security threat as an operational shortfall.
PKI certificate management is a highly detailed field that requires skilled staff and careful oversight to prevent unwanted outages and security risks. CISOs everywhere feel the strain of hiring and retaining qualified talent capable of managing the increasingly complex certificate lifecycle.
As the talent pool dwindles, it becomes more difficult to recruit those high-caliber PKI professionals who can perform certificate management at an enterprise scale. Even with a strong internal team, the complexity of certificate oversight can lead to costly, time-consuming setbacks. If certificates expire or are configured improperly, the entire IT team can find itself scrambling to resolve outages, wasting valuable time and money that can be applied to other high-risk program areas.
So how many people does it really take to manage your certificates?
Centralizing your PKI management can ease day-to-day stress, cut costs, and strengthen your security. With a scalable, managed setup, you’ll have an infrastructure that grows right along with your business.
Challenges to your IT team
Managing PKI requires specific skills in cryptography, certificate management, and understanding how certificates interact across systems. Even large IT teams can struggle to find people with the right expertise and time to keep certificates managed consistently.
Even a single expired or misconfigured certificate can trigger a domino effect that takes critical systems offline, potentially mobilizing the entire IT department to investigate and resolve the problem. And because an incident could be caused by a single oversight, 81% of organizations have experienced multiple disruptive security outages from expired certificates in the last two years, leading to lost productivity, compromised security, and potential reputational damage.
This high-stakes role can be a major stressor on your top talent if it involves tedious, repetitive tasks. A centralized, automated PKI management system could help keep your team satisfied and focused on high-value work.
Key takeaway: Centralized PKI reduces burnout and turnover by easing the repetitive demands on your team.
The costs of mismanaged PKI
When PKI is managed manually, with spreadsheets or scattered tools, IT teams spend significant time tracking certificates and avoiding mistakes. Many organizations lack full visibility over certificate lifecycles, leading to ongoing burdens and costly outages.
In the case of an expired certificate, the timeline for detecting and resolving the issue often spans hours, during which productivity drops and revenue losses accumulate. Downtime from an expired certificate is expensive, taking into account the “all hands on deck” approach to remediation and the immediate impact on business continuity. Additionally, downtime may have cascading effects on the reputation of your company brand, costing precious future revenue.
Automating certificate management helps prevent these costly issues, giving your team the visibility to manage certificates proactively, reducing outages without increasing workload.
Key takeaway: Automating PKI saves time and money, and prevents costly downtime.
Automation reduces operational burden
Adding automation and centralized management to your certificate processes reduces errors and repetitive tasks. Automated certificate discovery, issuance, and renewal can prevent outages, freeing up your team for more strategic, impactful security work.
Centralized platforms with automation provide a clear view of all certificates, so teams can catch issues early and avoid mistakes. This helps maintain uptime and regulatory compliance while ensuring secure connections.
Automation also reduces burnout and alert fatigue. When repetitive tasks are automated, your team can focus on advanced work like threat detection and security improvements, which keeps morale high and reduces turnover.
Key takeaway: Automated PKI improves efficiency, reduces errors, and keeps your team engaged and motivated.
Preparing your team for the post-quantum future
Automated certificate management is a powerful tool — and a crucial step toward preparing for your future. Implementing an automated platform or using PKI-as-a-service relieves your IT team and gets your business ready for the shift to quantum-safe encryption.
With recent post-quantum cryptography standards, organizations need to assess their cryptographic setups to stay secure. Automated certificate management provides centralized control, enabling smoother transitions as standards evolve and compliance needs change.
By automating tasks like discovery, renewals, and updates, your team gains the time to develop crucial crypto-agility skills, keeping your organization resilient as new threats arise.
Key takeaway: Automated PKI prepares your team for the quantum era by simplifying complex tasks and allowing time to build essential crypto-agility.
Build resiliency and support your team with Keyfactor
Secure, efficient PKI management is essential to digital resilience and an effective IT team. With the costs of certificate outages only increasing, no organization can afford the risks and inefficiencies of manual, decentralized approaches.
Automation and centralized PKI management through a reliable partner like Keyfactor can help you streamline processes and equip your certificate managers with the tools and insight to prepare your organization for the future.
Don’t leave your security to chance. Safeguard your systems, protect your IT team from burnout, and cultivate a proactive security environment with the help of Keyfactor. Take the shortcut to PKI maturity with us: a scalable, resilient PKI infrastructure that secures your digital identity, minimizes downtime, and keeps you ahead of threats looming on the horizon. Discover how Keyfactor can support your PKI management needs—reach out today to take the first step to your secure, agile future.
