Shorter certificate lifecycles are putting pressure on teams that still use manual processes to manage certificates across distributed infrastructure. The more environments involved—from networking and servers to edge devices and cloud workloads—the harder it becomes to maintain visibility and keep certificates current.

DigiCert and HPE are expanding their partnership to simplify that work through broader certificate lifecycle automation.

Bringing certificate automation across HPE environments

By combining DigiCert Trust Lifecycle Manager with HPE’s networking, compute, storage, and hybrid cloud platforms, customers can automate certificate management across Aruba networking environments, GreenLake deployments, servers, edge devices, and cloud workloads.

That matters because certificate management rarely stays confined to one part of the infrastructure. A team may be responsible for certificates across networking equipment, applications, cloud workloads, devices, and other systems, each with its own operational requirements.

When those certificates are managed separately, it becomes harder to maintain a clear picture of what’s deployed, when certificates expire, and what action needs to happen next. Manual processes can work at smaller scale, but they become much harder to sustain as the number of certificates and environments grows.

Centralized certificate lifecycle management helps reduce that burden. Instead of relying on spreadsheets or custom scripts, teams can automate certificate enrollment, renewal, replacement, and revocation while applying lifecycle governance from a central platform.

The practical benefits are straightforward: fewer outages caused by expired certificates, stronger identity-based authentication, and better visibility into the certificates supporting critical systems.

Shorter certificate lifecycles raise the stakes

The operational challenge is becoming more urgent as public TLS certificate lifecycles shrink.

With public TLS certificate lifecycles set to shrink to 47 days over the next few years, processes built around occasional manual renewal won’t scale the way they once did. Teams will need to handle certificate activity more frequently, which makes automation less of a convenience and more of an operational requirement.

At the same time, connected devices, cloud services, and Zero Trust initiatives are increasing the number of machine identities that need to be managed throughout their lifecycle.

That combination creates pressure from both directions: Certificates need attention more often, while the number of systems relying on them continues to grow.

For many teams, the challenge isn’t recognizing the need for automation. It’s having the PKI expertise and infrastructure integrations to put that automation into practice at scale.

That’s where the expanded DigiCert and HPE partnership can help. Customers can use DigiCert’s cloud-delivered certificate lifecycle management together with HPE’s infrastructure expertise and native integrations, making it easier to extend automation across a broader range of enterprise environments.

Machine identities need continuous management

Devices, workloads, applications, agents, and services all depend on trusted identities, but those identities can’t simply be issued once and forgotten. Certificates expire, infrastructure changes, applications move between environments, and security requirements evolve. Which means teams need a way to manage those identities continuously without relying on manual tracking.

Without consistent lifecycle management, teams can lose track of where certificates are deployed or when they need attention. That can create operational risk, especially when an expired or unmanaged certificate affects a business-critical system.

Automation helps shift that work from reactive to continuous. Certificates can be provisioned and renewed without requiring teams to manually track every expiration date, while centralized governance gives them greater visibility and control over what’s happening across the environment.

The goal isn’t to remove people from the process entirely. It’s to reduce the amount of routine certificate work that depends on someone remembering to act at exactly the right time.

Preparing for changing cryptographic requirements

Certificate management also has to account for what comes next.

Organizations are already preparing for changes in cryptographic requirements, including the transition to post-quantum cryptography. That transition will require teams to understand where cryptographic assets are in use and to update them as standards and requirements change.

A more automated, centralized approach to certificate lifecycle management can make that kind of change easier to manage. When teams have better visibility into their certificates and more consistent processes for renewing and replacing them, they’re in a stronger position to adapt.

A stronger foundation for what comes next

That’s the broader value of the expanded DigiCert and HPE partnership. By bringing DigiCert’s certificate lifecycle automation together with HPE’s infrastructure expertise, customers can simplify how they manage machine identities across complex enterprise environments while building a foundation that can evolve with changing certificate and cryptographic requirements.