47‑Day SSL/TLS Mandates: A Step Towards Transitioning to Automation
Home » 47‑Day SSL/TLS Mandates: A Step Towards Transitioning to Automation
Published: February 12, 2026
SSL certificates are now expiring faster than avocados.
Yes… avocados. You buy them green, blink twice, and suddenly they’re brown and useless.
47‑Day SSL/TLS Mandates: A Step Towards Transitioning to Automation
Home » 47‑Day SSL/TLS Mandates: A Step Towards Transitioning to Automation
Published: February 12, 2026
SSL certificates are now expiring faster than avocados.
Yes… avocados. You buy them green, blink twice, and suddenly they’re brown and useless. That’s exactly what’s happening to SSL/TLS certificates.
Not long ago, certificates lasted years. Then the rules changed, and we got 13-month validity. And now? We’re heading into a world where certificates will live for just 47 days.
Because this latest CA/B Forum mandate isn’t just an update, it’s a wake-up call for anyone responsible for keeping websites, apps, and digital infrastructure running securely. If you work in:
IT
DevOps
Cloud engineering
Cybersecurity
Compliance
…this change affects you.
Most teams struggle with certificate renewals even today, when lifespans are still measured in months.
With a 47-day certificate cycle, there is no next time. Manual management becomes a ticking time bomb. This change isn’t just another rule. It’s a turning point, forcing organisations to move from manual certificate chaos to automated certificate management.
Recent CA/B Forum Update
So… what exactly happened?
What is the sudden buzz on the internet regarding the 47-day certificates as though it were the end of life? The CA/B Forum, which defines the international regulations for SSL/TLS certificates, introduced a major update that changes the duration of certificates. And this is a gigantic change.
So far, the certificates have been valid for 13 months. That was a little, but bearable. Now? They are being pushed to 47 days only.
Far more than a year… far less than two months. And why they should, you ask, I know not? Here’s the logic behind it:
Shorter certificates = less time for hackers to exploit them.
Frequent renewals = faster adoption of new security standards.
Rapid expirations = pushes organisations toward automation.
Tighter lifecycles = reduces the impact of compromised or mis-issued certificates.
If your credit card expired every 47 days, you’d have to switch to auto-billing. That’s exactly what’s happening now with SSL/TLS. This update wasn’t designed to annoy IT teams (although it definitely will). It was designed to force a higher standard of security across the internet.
The Timeline: When does this Come to Reality?
Nobody would wish to see another unexpected outage since the industry unobtrusively rearranged the rules, and the IT discovered the problem when production was decreased.
Certificate issued on or after
Certificate issued before
Maximum Validity Period
Till 12 March, 2026
March 15, 2026
398 days
March 15, 2026
March 15, 2027
200 days
March 15, 2027
March 15, 2029
100 days
March 15, 2029
47 days
Note: First Phase enforcement begins March, 2026
And here is the rollout schedule in a scannable version (because you will be grateful):
Stage
What Actually Happens
Who Feels It First
Phase 1: Announcement
The CA/B Forum says, officially, “This is the new world.”
CAs, vendors, and anyone who builds the underlying tools.
Phase 2: Enforcement Window
The certificates start with a shorter validity. The first testers are adjusted; all the rest are spectators.
IT teams, DevOps, MSPs the people who keep systems alive.
Final Phase: Full Compliance
The grace period ends. The old habits stop working.
The internet ecosystem is publicly accessible to the entire internet, including its own infrastructure, personal infrastructure, cloud workloads, and SaaS services.
Most people underestimate timelines like this. They imagine a switch flipping one day. In reality, it’s more like gravity. a force that becomes obvious only after you ignore it long enough.
To make it clearer:
Right now, it’s mostly talk.
In the near future, the rate of cert expiry will surpass the systems that have been developed to handle them.
Then you will eventually break production when you have not automated renewals. Not hypothetically. Inevitably.
And this is the uncomfortable one: most of the teams are already aware of this. They are also aware that they are still recording certificates on spreadsheets, or that one individual is doing it, and he/she always remember. This is effective when the duration of certificates is one year. It does not work when the cycle is reduced to a couple of weeks.
Also Read: Manual vs. Automated SSL Certificate Management: Why Automation is Must
The time scale is not so much a time scale. It’s a deadline. The number of days the manual processes can maintain themselves. The automatization of the teams that anticipate this will follow suit. The remaining will hear the news of the change, just like people are informed about the majority of infrastructure failures.
What a Shorter SSL/TLS Lifespan Actually Means
People tend to treat certificates the way they treat things like passports: something you renew infrequently, almost as an afterthought. That worked when certs lasted a year or more. A 47-day lifespan changes the nature of the problem. It turns something occasional into something continuous.
The mistake is to think this is just about “renewing more often.” Shortening the lifespan of certificates shifts responsibility from human schedules to system behaviour. It forces infrastructure to become more automatic, because humans simply can’t operate at that tempo without breaking things.
You see this most clearly on web servers. A yearly renewal is easy to remember; seven or eight renewals a year is not. Each renewal becomes a point where something can go wrong. And the more points you have, the more likely one of them fails.
Cloud environments amplify this. In AWS, Azure, GCP, or Kubernetes, certificates weave through many layers of load balancers, microservices, sidecars, and serverless functions. Shortening their lifespan means these systems need to rotate certificates as a normal part of their operation, not a special event. If the rotation isn’t automated, the system becomes fragile.
Also Read: Certificate Lifecycle Management Emerging Trends to Watch in 2026
Load balancers add another failure mode. They’re often the bottleneck between a service working and not working. If a certificate doesn’t propagate correctly, the outage looks instantaneous, even though the cause was a manual process that didn’t scale.
Internal systems won’t escape this either. APIs, IoT devices, and service mesh identities all depend on the same basic mechanism of trust. If your private PKI still assumes long-lived certificates, it will start failing for the same reason public systems will.
Zero-trust environments show the logic most clearly. They rely on frequent verification of identity. In that world, short-lived certificates are an advantage but only if the whole chain of issuance and rotation is automatic. Otherwise, the system collapses under its own complexity.
The underlying pattern is simple:
Shorter lifespans cause faster expirations.
Faster expirations create more renewal cycles.
More renewal cycles expose every weakness in your process.
So the real shift isn’t technical as much as cultural. It moves us away from the old “configure it and forget it” mindset and toward a world where infrastructure must be able to maintain itself. Automation stops being an optimization and becomes the default.
Why This Change?
When a rule like certificate validity suddenly shrinks to 47 days, the first reaction is usually annoyance. It feels like someone added friction to a system that already worked. But changes like this rarely come from bureaucracy for its own sake. They come from noticing something fundamental about how security actually fails.
But there’s a reason behind it. Here are a few reasons:
Hackers don’t need years: A few weeks is enough. If a certificate gets compromised today and lasts another 12 months, that’s a full year of invisible access, impersonation, phishing, or MITM attacks.
But a certificate that expires in 47 days? That drastically shrinks the attack window.
Short-lived Certificates mean:
Less time to exploit
Less time to abuse
Less opportunity to weaponise
Quickened Security Standards Adoption: At the current stage of development, as a new best practice or encryption standard is published, it takes months, and in some cases years, to migrate organisations. Since the duration of certificates remained long, nobody was compelled to change.
Yet with momentary certificates:
New TLS protocols are more diffuse.
Weak cryptography fades away faster.
Best practices would not be exceptional anymore.
Imposing Digital Trust Discipline: The majority of organisations do not manage certificates on a proactive basis.
They react:
Certificates go out of date – fire drill.
If any of the systems fail, emergency patching is required.
Monitoring alert – panic mode
Briefer validity exercises greater operational discipline. You do not set and forget anymore. You have to automate, monitor, and control.
Manual SSL/TLS Lifecycle Is Difficult
The manual processes involved in managing SSL/TLS certificates were already painful, even for one-year certificates. Now, suppose it is done every 47 days.
And your certificate process still resembles:
A spreadsheet
Calendar reminders
Notion or Confluence.
…then brace yourself. Since what was once a rare job will, in the near future, become a cycle of crises.
The era of spreadsheets and reminders is over. With short-lived certificates, the organisations that cling to manual management will eventually break under the weight of operational pressure. It’s becoming a full-time discipline. And without automation, that discipline becomes chaos.
Why Certificate Automation Is Now a Non-Negotiable Requirement
By now, one thing is crystal clear. Managing SSL/TLS certificates manually is over. “This is the perfect time to automate.” Because the organisations that adopt automation now won’t just survive this shift
They’ll thrive with stronger uptime, predictable workflows, and a lot fewer 2 AM emergencies.
Automation gives you what manual processes never could:
No more calendar reminders.
No more spreadsheets.
No more ‘Who was supposed to renew that?’ conversations.
With automation, certificates:
Get issued automatically
Renew automatically
Deploy automatically
Rotate automatically
Get revoked automatically if compromised
Basically, the entire lifecycle runs without you having to babysit it. The ROI is undeniable.
Saves time (hundreds of hours per year in large environments)
Prevents outages (one outage alone can cost more than full automation adoption)
Keeps compliance teams calm (because everything is documented, monitored, and auditable)
Also Read: What Is Certificate Automation? How Automation Helps Prevent SSL Attacks?
What Automation Really Does
When certificate lifespans shrink to weeks, the weak point isn’t the cryptography, it’s the people managing it. Automation fixes that by removing humans from a process that humans aren’t good at, repeating the same task on a strict schedule.
It handles issuance without forms or waiting.
It renews certificates automatically, not when someone remembers.
And it deploys them across servers, load balancers, and cloud services without the usual drift or misconfiguration.
You also get a single place to see what’s happening, what’s expiring, what’s deployed, and what’s broken. That visibility turns automation from a black box into something you can supervise.
With integrations, ACME certificates become part of your infrastructure instead of an afterthought. Once it’s set up, your role shifts from managing certificates to watching the system that manages them.
Who Needs to Act Now?
If you think this update is something to “watch” or “plan for later,” you’re already behind. Because with 47-day certificate lifespans, this isn’t just a policy shift, it’s a job role shift. So who needs to take action right now?
CISOs
This change was written in your name, should you be in charge of risk reduction, compliance and site-of-the-major-story outages that would shake the headlines or would lead to board meetings.
Automation is no longer an option. It is a strategic security control.
DevOps & SRE Teams
You should already know that manual renewals are a nightmare if you work in the pipeline world, deployments, containers, microservices, or Kubernetes.
Certificates with a short expiration time + CI/CD settings = Outages waiting to occur
Automation of certificates eliminates friction, avoids failure and maintains smooth pipes in delivery.
All organisations that use SSL/TLS, be it internal, external or Net Native, are affected.
And the action teams now do?
They’ll avoid outages
They’ll avoid stress
They will climb safely without congesting
Conclusion
This change to 47-day certificates of both SSL and TLS is more than a change in the industry. It’s a turning point. Automation is no longer a choice; it is life.
Based on the number of outages caused by expired certificates, we could not use all the assistance we could receive in preventing such outages. Since in a world where certificates are becoming outdated as our food sources, the battle-speak in favour of these so-called companies that win will be that which erases human error and avoids outage, before compliance is anarchy.
Don’t leave the decision to make the first blackout, compelled to make the choice. It is time to contact Certera and start to switch to automated management of digital certificates.
Janki Mehta
Janki Mehta is a passionate Cyber-Security Enthusiast who keenly monitors the latest developments in the Web/Cyber Security industry. She puts her knowledge into practice and helps web users by arming them with the necessary security measures to stay safe in the digital world.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from EncryptedFence by Certera – Web & Cyber Security Blog authored by Janki Mehta. Read the original post at: https://certera.com/blog/47-day-ssl-tls-mandates-a-step-towards-transitioning-to-automation/
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