The Cost of Certificate Outages
Certificate-related outages are among the most preventable yet costly incidents in IT operations. When a certificate expires unexpectedly, the consequences can be severe:
- Service disruption: Applications, APIs, and websites become unavailable
- Security vulnerabilities: Users may bypass security warnings, exposing themselves to attacks
- Compliance violations: Many regulations require continuous certificate validity
- Reputation damage: Customer trust erodes with each outage
Real-World Impact
Major organizations have experienced significant outages due to certificate expiration:
- Microsoft Teams experienced a global outage in 2020 due to an expired certificate
- LinkedIn had authentication failures affecting millions of users
- Spotify's app crashed for users worldwide due to certificate issues
Building a Certificate Outage Prevention Strategy
Step 1: Comprehensive Discovery
You can't manage what you don't know exists. Implement thorough certificate discovery across:
- Public-facing infrastructure: Web servers, load balancers, CDNs
- Internal systems: Internal APIs, microservices, databases
- Cloud environments: AWS ACM, Azure Key Vault, GCP Certificate Manager
- Container platforms: Kubernetes secrets, service mesh certificates
- IoT devices: Device certificates, firmware signing certificates
Step 2: Centralized Visibility
Create a single pane of glass for all certificates:
- Dashboard views: At-a-glance status of all certificates
- Expiration timeline: Visual representation of upcoming expirations
- Risk scoring: Identify high-risk certificates based on criticality
- Ownership mapping: Know who's responsible for each certificate
Step 3: Multi-Layer Alerting
Implement a tiered alerting system:
Early Warning (90-60 days)
- Email notifications to certificate owners
- Dashboard indicators
- Weekly summary reports
Active Monitoring (60-30 days)
- Daily email reminders
- Slack/Teams notifications
- Ticket creation in ITSM systems
Critical Alert (30-7 days)
- Multiple daily notifications
- Escalation to managers
- SMS alerts for critical certificates
Emergency Protocol (7-0 days)
- Executive escalation
- War room activation
- 24/7 monitoring
Step 4: Automated Renewal
Where possible, automate certificate renewal:
- ACME automation: Use Let's Encrypt or other ACME CAs for automatic renewal
- Vendor integrations: Connect directly with certificate authorities
- Workflow automation: Trigger renewal workflows based on policies
- Approval routing: Implement approval workflows for sensitive certificates
Step 5: Deployment Automation
Ensure renewed certificates are automatically deployed:
- Load balancer integration: Push to F5, AWS ALB, NGINX
- Kubernetes operators: Automatically update secrets
- Configuration management: Ansible, Terraform, Puppet integration
- CDN updates: Automate Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS CloudFront updates
Monitoring Best Practices
External Monitoring
Monitor your public-facing certificates from outside your network:
- Use external monitoring services
- Check from multiple geographic locations
- Verify certificate chain completeness
- Monitor for certificate transparency logs
Internal Monitoring
For internal certificates:
- Agent-based monitoring on servers
- Network-based certificate scanning
- API health checks that verify TLS
- Synthetic transactions that test certificate validity
Metrics to Track
Key metrics for certificate health:
- Time to expiration: Days until each certificate expires
- Renewal success rate: Percentage of successful automatic renewals
- Mean time to remediate: Average time to fix certificate issues
- Certificate coverage: Percentage of infrastructure with managed certificates
Incident Response
Despite best efforts, incidents may occur. Prepare with:
Runbooks
Create detailed runbooks for certificate incidents:
- Identify the affected certificate
- Assess impact and notify stakeholders
- Generate or obtain replacement certificate
- Deploy to affected systems
- Verify service restoration
- Conduct post-incident review
Communication Templates
Prepare templates for:
- Internal stakeholder notifications
- Customer communications
- Executive briefings
- Post-incident reports
Conclusion
Preventing certificate outages requires a proactive, multi-layered approach combining discovery, monitoring, automation, and incident response. With proper tooling and processes, organizations can eliminate certificate-related outages entirely.
TigerTrust's enterprise certificate management platform provides all the capabilities needed to prevent certificate outages, from comprehensive discovery to automated renewal and intelligent alerting.