Automated Certificate Renewal & Lifecycle Management

Certificate lifecycle management is the process of managing digital certificates from issuance through renewal and revocation. It includes discovery, enrollment, deployment, monitoring, renewal, and revocation of X.509 certificates used for TLS/SSL, code signing, email (S/MIME), and authentication.

With TLS certificate validity periods being reduced to 47 days by 2029, manual renewal becomes impossible at scale. Automatic renewal prevents outages caused by expired certificates, reduces human error, and ensures continuous compliance with security policies.

ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) is an open protocol standardized by the IETF for automating TLS certificate issuance and renewal. It is used by Let's Encrypt and supported by DigiCert, enabling zero-touch certificate management.

MazeVault combines certificate lifecycle management with secrets management, key management and compliance reporting in one platform. It issues certificates from DigiCert, Let's Encrypt, I.CA, Microsoft AD CS, Venafi and other CAs, so it can run alongside a standalone CLM tool or replace it.

MazeVault agents on Windows and Linux scan configured directories for PEM, DER and PFX files, Java keystores and the Windows certificate store. Certificates from connected CA accounts are synced as well. The inventory is kept centrally with expiration tracking and alerting.

MazeVault is built to support DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) and NIS2 requirements. It provides a hash-chained audit log, automated certificate and secret rotation, optional HSM/KMS key protection, SIEM streaming and compliance reports. Compliance itself depends on how your organization runs its processes, and MazeVault provides the technical controls and evidence.

Our ROI calculator models a certificate-related outage as four hours of downtime plus customer churn, incident response and regulatory exposure, based on research by Gartner, Ponemon Institute and ITIC. Per incident that comes to about €4K for a small business, €500K for a mid-size company (downtime at €75,000 per hour) and €1.9M for an enterprise. With two incidents per year and 20, 200 or 2,000 certificates, the annual risk is about €11K, €2.3M and €12.6M. Real-world examples: an expired certificate at Ericsson left millions of O2 customers in the UK without mobile data in December 2018, LinkedIn had outages from expired certificates in 2017 and 2019, and an expired certificate on a monitoring device let the 2017 Equifax breach go unnoticed for 76 days. MazeVault lowers this risk through automated discovery, expiration monitoring and renewal. Try our interactive ROI calculator →