AppViewX recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact study, and the timing is deliberate. March 15th marks the beginning of the CA/Browser Forum’s phased reduction in SSL/TLS certificate validity periods, so many enterprises are revisiting their PKI and certificate lifecycle management (CLM) strategies. The study puts hard numbers around something the industry has been talking about in general terms for a while: what CLM actually costs organizations, and what changes when you automate it. You can explore the full findings of the study [here].
To quantify the impact, Forrester built a composite organization representative of AppViewX customers and found it achieved a 302% ROI and $3.9 million in total three-year, risk-adjusted benefits. Forreter found manual certificate renewals were taking approximately 30 minutes per certificate. Automated renewals brought that down to roughly 15 seconds. One financial services customer went from 15 major certificate-related outages in a year to three, with the remaining three traced back to certificates that hadn’t been migrated to the platform.
Those numbers tell an intriguing story, but the more interesting conversation is the one behind them.
Why Certificate Management Has Stayed in the Background
SSL or TLS certificates are infrastructure that most people never think about. They operate invisibly, confirming that a website or application is what it claims to be, and that data in transit is encrypted. When they are managed well, nobody notices. That invisibility has meant that certificate management has historically been treated as routine maintenance, something to handle on an annual cycle, largely by hand, with a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder.
That approach worked well enough at a certain scale and pace. However, the CA/Browser Forum’s validity period reductions are turbocharging that pace. Certificates that were renewed once a year will need to be renewed more frequently as the phased schedule continues, and organizations that built their processes around an annual rhythm will need to rethink how that work gets done.
The IT and Security Staffing Dimension
One thing the Forrester study surfaces that doesn’t always make it into these conversations is the human element. Both the cost of manual certificate management and the errors that often trigger outages must be considered.
Thirty minutes per certificate renewal may not sound like much in isolation, but across an enterprise environment with thousands of certificates, it adds up to a significant portion of skilled engineering time. That matters because the engineers best equipped to manage a complex certificate environment are typically the same people doing higher-order security work. When routine renewal tasks are absorbing their hours, other priorities wait. Automation doesn’t eliminate the need for skilled oversight, but it does shift where that expertise gets applied.
Manual certificate management is detail-intensive and unforgiving of small mistakes, and the more certificates an organization is managing by hand, the more opportunities there are for something to slip through. Most organizations prefer to put CLM on auto to reduce time- and detail-intensive tasks and human error, saving both time and resources for more strategic initiatives.
Certificate Management as Part of a Bigger Picture
It’s also worth noting that the certificate validity discussion sits within a broader conversation about machine identity. Enterprise environments now include enormous numbers of non-human identities: services, containers, APIs, cloud workloads, IoT devices. Each requires its own certificates and its own governance. The organizations treating the March 15 milestone as an opportunity to modernize their broader approach to certificate and machine identity management are building something more durable than those approaching it as a one-time compliance adjustment.
The Forrester study gives practitioners and security leaders a concrete, third-party data point for those internal conversations. Business cases for infrastructure investment can be hard to make in the abstract. Quantified ROI, incident cost reduction, and documented payback periods make them considerably easier.
The full study is available here. For organizations working through what shorter validity periods mean for their operations, it’s a practical starting point.
Tags
About the Author
