Why certificate chaos is undermining your compliance strategy
Fragmented certificate management across teams and tools makes it difficult to enforce policies, leading to audit failures and regulatory fines. The updated NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 highlights governance as central to cybersecurity, increasing pressure on compliance leaders to demonstrate control. Centralized Internal PKI systems offer visibility, automation, and policy enforcement to meet regulatory demands and reduce operational risk. Ultimately, strong certificate management is essential for maintaining trust and audit readiness.
Governance and the growing importance of certificate management
Compliance leaders know that security controls are only as strong as their enforcement. Yet many enterprises lack consistent governance over one of their most critical control layers: digital certificates.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0, released in 2024, introduced a new core function: "Govern". The Govern function focuses on how an organization establishes and monitors its cybersecurity risk management strategy, policies, and oversight. This addition reflects the growing recognition that cybersecurity isn't just a technical issue—it's a governance and business risk issue.
Certificates are everywhere—supporting certificate-based authentication to applications, devices, users, and workloads. But when certificate management is fragmented across teams, tools, and business units, policy enforcement becomes difficult, if not impossible. As a result, expired or improperly issued certificates can easily go undetected until they trigger an audit failure or a breach.
Compliance risk in a fragmented certificate landscape
The cost of non-compliance is rising. Regulatory fines for violations of data protection laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS are steep—and the reputational damage from being cited in an audit report can take years to repair. For example, the GDPR can fine companies up to 20 million euros or 4% of annual revenue for non-compliance (GDPR, 2025).
Compounding the issue is the rising pressure on CISOs and compliance officers to provide proof of policy enforcement, identity assurance, and secure infrastructure in real time. Auditors now expect centralized oversight and detailed evidence of how organizations manage digital trust (ISACA, 2023).
Unfortunately, many security teams struggle to produce accurate certificate inventories with antiquated methods like manual spreadsheets or siloed teams and systems, let alone demonstrate consistent policy enforcement. This not only creates risk but leads to extended audit cycles, regulatory fines, and lost credibility with partners and stakeholders. When organizations can't answer basic questions like "Which systems use certificates?" or "Who owns them?", compliance breaks down at its foundation.
Centralizing control with Internal PKI
With the right Internal PKI set-up, these challenges can be addressed head-on by centralizing certificate issuance and lifecycle management. With full visibility into certificate usage across environments, organizations can enforce policies uniformly and provide auditors with detailed logs and reports.
Role-based access, automated revocation, and policy-based workflows ensure that every certificate issued meets compliance requirements—without burdening already stretched teams.
When selecting the right internal PKI system, organizations should prioritize solutions that can effectively support complex regulatory and compliance requirements through strong governance and policy enforcement. The system should offer full traceability across the certificate lifecycle to meet audit demands and enhance security oversight.
It must deliver operational efficiency that integrates seamlessly with business workflows, avoiding disruptions or slowdowns. An ideal internal PKI should scale to manage trust across diverse environments while simplifying collaboration between security and audit teams. Ultimately, the right solution provides robust protection, streamlined management, and the confidence that trust is being handled securely and transparently across the organization.
Why Sectigo’s Internal PKI stands out
Sectigo’s Internal PKI solution gives organizations the control they need to stay ahead of risk. With a centralized, single-pane-of-glass interface, teams can eliminate certificate-related blind spots while ensuring consistent compliance and keeping services running and outages at bay.
