The clock on digital trust is about to speed up — and many organizations are not prepared for what comes next.
Related: The Google Bazel tool outage
TLS certificates — the quiet backbone of secure online communication — are headed toward dramatically shorter lifespans, and organizations will have to keep pace.
Today, many certificates last more than a year. But under formal changes already advancing through the CA/Browser Forum, those lifecycles are shrinking in steps: from roughly 398 days to 200, then to 100, and ultimately to 47 days by 2029.
That compresses renewal windows, removes operational cushion, and raises stakes for uptime, reliability, and customer confidence.
In that reality, manual certificate management will not scale. Missed renewals don’t just create technical debt — they trigger outages, revenue loss, and cascading trust failures. The sustainable answer, DigiCert’s Ashley Stevenson explains, is modernization: consolidate fragmented environments, centralize visibility, and automate the lifecycle.
Organizations that treat this as a narrow compliance checklist may fall behind. Those that build platform-driven oversight — monitoring, policy enforcement, and automatic renewal — strengthen resilience and reduce business risk.
This is not a distant forecast. It is a near-term operational shift. And it recasts certificates from background plumbing into a live trust function that warrants executive attention.
Catch the full Strategic Reel above, part of Last Watchdog’s ongoing series on cybersecurity leadership.
Acohido
Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.
(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)
The post STRATEGIC REEL: Certificate expiration is speeding up — outpacing legacy management first appeared on The Last Watchdog.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Last Watchdog authored by bacohido. Read the original post at: https://www.lastwatchdog.com/strategic-reel-certificate-expiration-is-speeding-up-outpacing-legacy-management/