Certificate Lifecycle Management

Unsung's certificate lifecycle management services help organisations automate issuance, reduce operational risk and maintain compliance. Our expert-led approach supports business continuity through effective certificate governance and control.

Why certificate management matters

Expired certificates cause service disruptions that affect customers, partners and internal operations. Without effective lifecycle management, organisations face growing complexity from unknown certificates, time-consuming manual processes and insufficient governance over issuance and revocation. We have covered the real cost of an expired certificate separately — it is rarely the certificate.

Public key infrastructure underpins digital security across your estate. Certificates enable authentication, encryption and code signing, binding public keys to verified identities. Lifecycle management keeps those certificates valid and trusted, while private keys need secure storage and protection — typically through hardware security modules where the assurance level demands it.

The pressure is increasing. As organisations adopt cloud services and support mobile and IoT devices, the estate expands faster than the process managing it. At the same time, public TLS lifetimes are falling to 47 days, which takes renewal frequency up roughly eightfold on every affected certificate. Manual processes that just about held together will not survive that.

Achieving visibility starts with understanding what cryptographic assets exist across your estate. A cryptographic bill of materials provides that foundation, cataloguing certificates, keys and algorithms so automation operates from a complete and accurate baseline.

Certificate lifecycle management is fundamental to PKI health and operational reliability. Poorly managed certificates lead to outages, security gaps and compliance failures. Most organisations struggle with the same three things: visibility across the inventory, manual renewal processes, and inadequate monitoring of what is approaching expiry.

Unsung provides consultancy and technical delivery across the full lifecycle. We help organisations regain control of their certificate estate, whether that means building new processes, improving an existing implementation, or responding to audit findings.

Our approach is vendor-neutral. We work with the platforms and technology that suit your environment rather than the ones we have a commercial relationship with, and our CLM vendor and licensing evaluation guide sets out how we approach that comparison.

What good looks like is covered in our article on the four pillars of CLM — applicability, visibility, availability and automation.

How we help with managing certificates

Assessment and advisory

We review your current inventory, PKI architecture and management processes, identifying gaps in visibility, control and efficiency. That covers renewal workflows, registration authority practices and root certificate governance, examining the process from request through to expiry.

You receive recommendations addressing both immediate improvements and the resources needed to support future requirements. A PKI health check is usually the right starting point, and our systems integrator and healthcare case studies show what one produces.

Design and implementation

We design and deploy lifecycle management aligned to your PKI architecture, security objectives and compliance obligations. Implementations establish clear processes for issuance, renewal, revocation and retirement.

We integrate with certification authorities, configure certificate repositories and implement secure storage for private keys. In enterprise environments we make sure administrators can manage centrally while enabling appropriate self-service for application teams — covering both internal architectures and cloud deployments across hybrid estates. Inside an enterprise CLM deployment sets out the features that matter once you are live.

Automation integration

We deploy and integrate automation covering the process from request through to expiry. Implementations include protocol support for CMP, ACME, EST and SCEP, ensuring coverage across web servers, enterprise applications, IoT devices and legacy network infrastructure.

Automation removes manual effort, eliminates a category of human error and applies policy consistently. We implement lifecycle automation that handles provisioning, tracks validity periods, manages key rotation and handles revocation for compromised or deprecated certificates.

Where teams push back, the objections are usually practical rather than technical. Our guide to overcoming resistance to automation covers how to work through them.

Monitoring and alerting

We implement monitoring that tracks certificate status across your network, devices and services, providing visibility into certificates issued by both internal and external authorities, identifying unknown certificates and alerting on approaching expiry.

Effective monitoring covers more than expiry dates. Chain and trust store problems, weak algorithms and short key lengths all need surfacing before they reach production.

Certificate policy and crypto agility

We help you define and enforce policies aligned to regulatory standards and internal governance, establishing controls over how certificates are purchased, issued and managed across the organisation. Clear policy frameworks support audit readiness and remove the drift that develops when different teams apply different standards.

We also build crypto agility into the operating model. The same capabilities that make lifecycle management work — a complete inventory and the ability to re-issue at scale — are what the post-quantum transition will demand. Organisations getting this right now are building that capability at the same time.

Training and support

We provide training for security teams, administrators and users, building internal capability rather than dependency. Knowledge transfer covers best practice, the end-to-end process, identity verification and the use of centralised platforms.

Where you would rather not run it in-house at all, PKI management and hosting is available as an alternative.

Getting started

Most engagements begin with establishing what is actually deployed. Until the inventory is complete, every other decision is based on assumption.

Talk to our team to discuss your requirements.