Technology

The most-aggressively short timelines don't apply until 2029. Regardless, now is the time to get serious about automation. That is going to require vendors of a lot of off-the-shelf products to come up with better (or any) automation integrations for existing cert management systems or whatever the new standard becomes.

The current workflow many big orgs use is something like:

1. Poor bastard application engineer/support guy is forced to keep a spreadsheet for all the machines and URLs he "owns" and set 30-day reminders when they will expire,

2. manually generate CSRs,

3. reach out to some internal or 3rd party group who may ignore his request or fuck it up twice before giving him correct signed certs,

4. schedule and get approval for one or more "possible brief outage" maintenance windows because the software requires manually rebinding the new certs in some archaic way involving handjamming each cert into a web interface on a separate Windows box.

As the validity period shrinks and the number of environments the average production application uses grows, the concept of doing these processes manually becomes a total clusterfuck.