Incoming changes to certificate lifespans will cause 12x the workload for unprepared IT teams

Sectigo, a global leader in digital certificates and Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), today released a guide to support IT teams in managing Google’s plan to shorten digital certificate lifespans from 398 to 90 days, and Apple’s recent draft proposal to incrementally decrease lifespans to 45 days by 2027. Sectigo’s 45-Day Survival Guide is a free, comprehensive eBook that addresses the challenges that many organizations may encounter with this transition. It offers practical insights and strategies for understanding, automating, and streamlining certificate lifecycle management, ensuring that organizations remain compliant and secure.

Traditional, manual certificate management processes are cumbersome and error prone. They create the risk of compromised certificates and expose organizations to security risks, downtime, loss of customer trust, and financial and reputational damage. For unprepared businesses running without automated certificate lifecycle management, the shift to 45-day certificates will increase IT workloads twelvefold, requiring certificate renewals every month with a two-week preparation window.

"Sectigo has consistently supported the trend of reducing certificate lifespans and we fully endorse Google’s decision and Apple’s intention to implement shorter digital certificate lifespans. This proactive move will strengthen ecosystem integrity and mitigate the risk of outages and breaches,” said Kevin Weiss, CEO at Sectigo. “However, we understand that many organizations and their IT teams may not be prepared for this shift. Our comprehensive guide is designed to educate organizations, helping them prioritize timely certificate updates, which can be seamlessly managed through automated Certificate Lifecycle Management solution.”

Sectigo is also offering supplementary educational assets to help organizations understand the importance of automating certificate lifecycle management including:

• Expert-led webinars on preparing for 45-day SSL certificates
• A compilation of relevant blogs that explore how to take immediate action to prepare your infrastructure and how to plan long-term for shortening certificate lifecycles
• Insightful conversations surrounding shorter digital certificate lifespans from our award-winning podcast, Root Causes

According to Gartner^®, organizations can “ensure uninterrupted operation in high-volume and/or short-life-span certificate use cases by implementing automated CLM. As certificate lifespans get shorter and the number of certificates grows, manual certificate life cycle management processes reach their scalability limits.”¹ By thoroughly understanding a shortened certificate lifecycle and leveraging automation, businesses can proactively prepare for any upcoming policy changes, thereby minimizing the risk of disruptions caused by manual certificate management processes.

Sectigo’s 45-Day Survival Guide, and additional resources are now available for free download. Businesses are encouraged to download and utilize the guide to begin their preparation process as soon as possible.

¹ Gartner, Effectively Manage Your Organization’s Certificates, Paul Rabinovich, Erik Wahlstrom, February 21, 2024

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About Sectigo

Sectigo is the industry’s most innovative provider of comprehensive certificate lifecycle management (CLM), with automated solutions and digital certificates that secure every human and machine identity for the world’s largest brands. Its automated, cloud-native, universal CLM platform issues and manages digital certificates provided by all trusted certificate authorities (CAs) to simplify and improve security protocols across the enterprise. Sectigo is one of the longest-standing and largest CAs with more than 700,000 customers and two decades of delivering unparalleled digital trust. For more information, visit www.sectigo.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

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