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Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) - Centrally Manage and Automate Digital Certificates

With Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), we create transparency across your certificates, automate their management, and reduce both outage and security risks.

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Reliably Manage Certificates and Prevent Outages

Digital certificates secure connections, authenticate systems, and enable encrypted communication. At the same time, certificates have a limited validity period and must be renewed, distributed, and replaced in good time.

The more certificates and systems there are, the more difficult manual management becomes. In the worst case, a forgotten or expired certificate can lead to application and service outages.

Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) establishes a structured and largely automated process for the entire lifecycle of digital certificates.

86 %

of companies experienced at least one serious system outage in the past two years that was directly attributable to an expired or incorrectly managed certificate.

114.591

internal certificates are managed by an average of just four people – manual guesswork instead of genuine IT security.

Certificate Lifecycle Management Serverraum

What Is Certificate Lifecycle Management?

Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) covers the centralized management of digital certificates throughout their entire lifecycle. This includes, among other things:

  • Certificate discovery and inventory
  • Issuance and provisioning
  • Monitoring of validity periods
  • Automated renewal
  • Distribution to target systems
  • Revocation and replacement
  • Documentation and reporting
This transforms certificate management from a manual, individual task into a controlled enterprise-wide process.

Challenges in Practice

In many organizations, digital certificates are distributed across different systems, applications, and cloud platforms. Centralized processes or a complete overview of existing certificates are often missing. As the number of digital identities grows, automated management is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for secure and stable IT operations.

  • Certificates expire unnoticed.
  • Renewals are performed manually.
  • Responsibilities are not clearly defined.
  • Security policies are implemented inconsistently.
  • Administrative effort continues to increase.

OEDIV SecuSys integrates Certificate Lifecycle Management with your existing IT and security structures – for transparent processes, automated certificate management, and reliable digital communication.

What We Can Do for You

  • Analyze existing certificate landscapes
  • Introduce Certificate Lifecycle Management
  • Automate certificate processes
  • Integrate existing Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs)
  • Connect Hardware Security Modules (HSMs)
  • Manage internal and public certificates
  • Monitor certificate validity periods
  • Integrate with existing IAM and security architectures
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Build Certificate Management Strategically

With certificate validity periods becoming increasingly shorter, professional Certificate Lifecycle Management is becoming increasingly relevant for many organizations.

OEDIV SecuSys supports organizations in reducing manual processes, creating transparency across their certificates, and automating renewal processes as extensively as possible.

Your Benefits

Professional Certificate Lifecycle Management improves security while reducing administrative effort.

  • Centralized management of all certificates
  • Automated renewal processes
  • Reduced likelihood of outages
  • Complete transparency
  • Higher compliance
  • Support for hybrid IT environments
  • Less manual administrative effort
  • Better planning of certificate operations

CLM with OEDIV SecuSys

OEDIV SecuSys supports organizations in establishing and optimizing their Certificate Lifecycle Management. We analyze existing processes, certificate inventories, and technical dependencies and use these findings to develop a suitable automation approach.As a vendor-independent partner, we consider both PKI and certificate management solutions as well as their integration into the existing system landscape.A key focus is the connection between technology and processes. An automated process only works reliably when responsibilities, renewal processes, and technical dependencies are clearly defined.

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FAQ

Frequently Asked
Questions

Here you will find answers to the most important questions about our services and solutions.

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What Is Certificate Lifecycle Management?
Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the centralized management of digital certificates throughout their entire lifecycle: discovering existing certificates, requesting and issuing them, distributing them to servers and devices, monitoring their validity periods, automatically renewing them, revoking them, and documenting them. We consider the topic from two perspectives: the automated renewal of machine and server certificates, and certificate-based access management, where a single card combines building access, computer login, printer access, and access to other systems.

The maximum validity period for public certificates used for encrypted web connections (TLS) is being reduced in stages: to 200 days as of March 15, 2026, to 100 days from March 2027, and to 47 days from March 2029.

Shorter validity periods limit the potential damage caused by a compromised certificate. For organizations, this means that a certificate previously renewed once a year will then have to be renewed eight times a year. With hundreds of certificates, manual management will no longer be feasible.

We help you establish the necessary automation before 2027.

Immediate disruptions can occur: browsers block websites, interfaces reject connections, applications stop communicating, and monitoring systems may become blind. In 2020, a globally used collaboration service experienced several hours of downtime because a single certificate was not renewed in time. In 2017, an expired certificate at a major credit reporting company prevented an ongoing data breach from being detected for more than two months.

A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) provides the foundation: certification authorities, policies, and key material used to issue and validate certificates.

Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the operational layer on top of this. It knows which certificates were issued by which certification authority, where they are being used, who they belong to, and when they need to be renewed.

A PKI without CLM can issue certificates but may lose track of where they are being used. We plan both together.

It is a management system that brings together the certificates used by your existing access systems, such as door systems, printers, cafeteria payment systems, and computer logins, in one place.

Employees receive a single card that is configured according to your requirements and can be used across all these systems.

The system runs in your data center and continues to operate for up to three months without a network connection. If you also require a smartphone app, a cloud instance can be added.

Identity and access rights remain managed by the specialized systems responsible for Identity Governance and Privileged Access. Access management complements these systems; it does not replace them.

Automation can be implemented using the ACME protocol, which allows servers to request and deploy certificates automatically, as well as through agents and integrations for web servers, load balancers, container platforms, cloud services, and network devices. A Certificate Lifecycle Management platform centrally controls these processes, reports exceptions, and documents every renewal. A complete inventory is a prerequisite, because only what is known can be automated. That is why we begin every project with a scan of the entire infrastructure.
Digital certificates are used on web servers and load balancers, to secure communication between interfaces and services, in container platforms, for email encryption (S/MIME), for VPN and Wi-Fi access, for software signing, on connected devices and production equipment, on network components, and for authenticating users and devices to Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID. In a medium-sized organization, this can amount to several thousand certificates, issued by public certification authorities as well as by the organization’s own infrastructure.
Yes. We plan and implement Public Key Infrastructures with root and issuing certification authorities, key material stored in Hardware Security Modules, and integration with Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, and device management systems. The PKI serves as a trust anchor for machine and device identities, smartcard authentication, email encryption, and qualified electronic signatures. We incorporate certificate management into the PKI design from the outset, so that the PKI does not merely issue certificates but also maintains visibility into the whereabouts and use of every certificate.