AUSTRALIA, Sydney – July 10, 2025 – DigiCert, a global leader in digital trust, released new findings from its Trust Pulse Survey highlighting the Australian business impact of mismanaged digital certificates. Two fifths (42.1%) of all enterprises surveyed experienced downtime due to certificate-related incidents in the past year—resulting in significant financial losses, service disruptions, and reputational harm.
As organisations scale their digital operations, the volume and complexity of certificates have outpaced manual management methods, leaving enterprises vulnerable to outages, compliance failures, and escalating security risks. Regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA, EU DORA, PCI DSS, the SOCI Act in Australia, and forthcoming CA/B Forum changes are placing increased emphasis on certificate management. By 2029, major browsers will enforce 47-day certificate lifespans, while the push toward quantum-safe algorithms will break legacy PKI configurations and overwhelm manual processes—making modernisation not optional, but essential.
“PKI certificates are the invisible backbone of the world’s digital civilization—and when they are mismanaged, the organizations feel it,” said Ashley Stevenson, Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing at DigiCert. “The survey findings make one thing clear: manual approaches can’t keep up with the scale, speed, and scrutiny organizations are under today. Enterprises need automation and visibility to reduce risk, maintain compliance, and preserve customer trust. Certificate management is no longer a tactical task—it’s a strategic necessity worthy of the same maturity and governance as other foundational disciplines like identity management.”
The Hidden Cost of Expired Certificates: Downtime and Dollars Lost
Despite the central role digital certificates play in securing infrastructure, communication, and identity, many organisations still manage them manually or with fragmented tools. The result is that over a third of respondents (42.1%) reported experiencing service downtime due to certificate-related incidents in the last year. A further 36.3% attributed outages specifically to expired certificates— one of the most preventable causes of disruption in enterprise environments.
And the financial toll is not insignificant: 29.7% of organisations reported losses between $50,000 and $250,000, while 14.7% lost more than $250,000 due to certificate-related issues. The operational impact is equally troubling: half of respondents endured 5 to 24 hours of downtime, and 10.4% experienced 25 hours or more.
Growing Complexity, Shrinking Visibility
Certificate volumes are rising across industries, with 74.9% of respondents expecting growth in the next 2 years. Yet organisations remain underprepared. While nearly 50% of respondents manage between 1,000 and 10,000 certificates, the firm majority (83.3%) expressed moderate to extreme concern about their ability to track certificate expiration dates. Without automation, human error and system misconfiguration become inevitable.
From IT Headache to Executive Mandate
What was once considered a backend IT task is now an executive concern. CISOs and other senior security leaders ranked customer trust (86.5%), regulatory compliance (84.9%), and certificate expiration (83.8%), as a moderate to extreme concern related to certificate management—underscoring the growing importance of certificate management in maintaining operational resilience.
Looking Ahead: Automation and Agility as Top Priorities
The survey highlights a clear direction forward: 50.2% of respondents named automated certificate lifecycle management a top strategic priority for 2025, followed closely by IoT standardisation (40.9%). The organisations that succeed will be those that treat digital trust as an enterprise-wide imperative—not a background task.
Resources
Stop Certificate Outages and Reduce Costs by Automating
Read the blog: Automating TLS Renewals
About DigiCert
DigiCert is a leading global provider of digital trust, enabling individuals and businesses to engage online with the confidence that their footprint in the digital world is secure. DigiCert® ONE, the platform for digital trust, provides organisations with centralised visibility and control over a broad range of public and private trust needs, securing websites, enterprise access and communication, software, identity, content and devices. DigiCert pairs its award-winning software with its industry leadership in standards, support and operations, and is the digital trust provider of choice for leading companies around the world. For more information, visit www.digicert.com or follow @digicert
