How to adapt your business to the new 47-Day SSL/TLS Certificate Standard?
As you’ve probably heard, one significant upcoming change is the continued reduction in the maximum validity period of TLS certificates. By 2029, this lifespan is expected to drop to just 47 days. For many organizations, this shift poses a major operational and security challenge.
The Challenge: Shorter Certificate Lifespans, Higher Operational Pressure
In the past, TLS/SSL certificates could be issued for up to 2 years or more. But over time, industry-wide best practices and regulations — particularly from the CA/Browser Forum — have pushed for shorter certificate validity to improve security and limit the impact of compromised keys.
Moving to a 47-day lifespan means organizations will need to renew and deploy certificates up to 7–8 times a year. This introduces new layers of complexity:
Increased risk of service disruptions if certificates expire unnoticed
When TLS certificates expire unexpectedly, services that rely on them — such as websites, APIs, email servers, or internal applications — can immediately become inaccessible or trigger security warnings for end users. This can lead to downtime, loss of revenue, and damage to reputation. As certificate lifespans shorten, the margin for error narrows, making manual tracking and renewal increasingly risky. Without proper monitoring and automation, it’s alarmingly easy to miss an expiration date, leading to sudden and costly service disruptions.
More frequent manual interventions, if automation isn’t in place
Organizations without automation in place will face the burden of renewing and deploying certificates much more frequently, potentially every few weeks. Each renewal typically involves generating new certificates, updating them across multiple servers or services, and ensuring proper reloads or restarts of applications. When done manually, this process is time-consuming, error-prone, and unsustainable at scale. Without automation, IT teams risk being overwhelmed by routine maintenance tasks, increasing the chance of misconfigurations, delays, or oversights that can compromise service availability and security.
Tight coupling between certificate renewal and infrastructure deployment workflows
As certificate renewal becomes more frequent, any manual or poorly integrated process can create friction, delay deployments, or introduce inconsistencies across environments. A tight coupling between certificate management and infrastructure means that even small misalignments can lead to failed rollouts, security gaps, or downtime. Without streamlined automation, teams may struggle to maintain agility and reliability as certificate turnover accelerates.
The Solution: Automation and Proactive Certificate Management
At ASP, we view this change as an opportunity to improve the resilience and automation of your IT landscape. We help organizations fully automate their certificate lifecycle using Ansible, advanced scripting, and integrations with public and private Certificate Authorities.
Our approach includes:
- Automated certificate issuance and renewal, with full integration into your existing infrastructure
- Customizable deployment workflows that push updated certificates across environments with zero downtime
- Monitoring and alerting to proactively track certificate health
- Support for both public and internal PKI systems
We offer this as part of our managed services: ongoing support, maintenance, and evolution tailored to your business needs — so you can focus on your core business, while we take care of your TLS security posture.
Let’s build a secure, automated IT environment together.