ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation and a leading provider of enterprise IT management and security solutions, has announced post-deployment automation for transport layer security (TLS) certificates in Key Manager Plus, its certificate lifecycle and machine identity management solution. Key Manager Plus now automates the final stages of certificate renewal, pushing certificates to the target server, running configured scripts, restarting dependent services, and notifying stakeholders, so the whole certificate lifecycle runs without manual intervention.
Historically, most organisations did not have much incentive to automate certificate management. Even the ones that did adopt automation workflows limited it to discovery, periodic expiration alerts, and in some instances, automated renewals. That changed when the CA/Browser Forum voted to reduce the maximum validity of public TLS certificates, phasing down from the legacy 398-day validity period to a 200-day period in March 2026 (current cadence), which will drop to 100 days by March 2027, and finally 47 days by March 2029.
“We’re going from under 200 certificates to over 2,000, across a lot of domains, different server setups, credentials and post-deployment actions for nearly all of it. We’ve had to dedicate significant engineering time to certificate management alone since the change to 200 days. With the 47-day certificate renewals coming up, automation is the only way we can keep up, and Key Manager Plus’ CA-agnostic, certificate lifecycle management has helped us automate the whole thing,” said Jonathan Choiniere, infrastructure manager at RevSpring, a payment solutions provider based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Automating the Last Step of Certificate Renewal
Getting the certificate live is the last step in the renewal process, and this post-deployment task has primarily been handled manually by many teams. While this works when teams are renewing one certificate a year, as certificate lifespans shrink and the same steps repeat roughly eight times as often, manual errors become more likely and the cost of an outage can run into the millions.
“Certificate renewal is rarely the hard part. The work that piles up on teams is what comes after it, at scale: pushing certificates to the server, restarting the services, and confirming they actually went live. End-to-end automation is what turns a 47-day renewal cycle from a scramble into something that runs on its own. With Key Manager Plus, we are eliminating the last manual step in the lifecycle management loop,” said Vasudevan Seshadri, director of product management at ManageEngine.
Quantifying the 47-Day Shift
To help organisations assess their own exposure to the reduced certificate validity mandate, ManageEngine has also released a 47-day TLS impact calculator. It lets enterprises quantify what the mandate means for them based on three factors: the size of their certificate estate, their current renewal labour, and their outage exposure. From there, it compares those numbers against what they will look like once their TLS certificate lifecycle is fully automated. That automation is what Key Manager Plus delivers, and it runs identically whether teams deploy on-premises or in the cloud.
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