80% Are Modernizing PKI. That's Just Treating the Symptom.

DigiCert's 2026 Global PKI Research Report, PKI Under Pressure: The Tipping Point for Modernization, surveyed more than 400 senior IT leaders and reached a striking conclusion: roughly 80% of organizations are implementing or planning a PKI modernization initiative. When a leading certificate authority publishes research saying its own technology is under pressure, it is worth asking what “modernization” actually fixes.

The honest answer: modernization manages the symptoms. It does not cure the cause.What the data actually says

The report is candid about the strain. Nearly three-quarters of organizations are very or extremely concerned about outages caused by expired certificates, and the same share worry about certificate sprawl as machine identities multiply. Shrinking certificate lifespans mean more renewals, more often, with more opportunities to fail.

These are not edge cases. They are the predictable consequences of an architecture that ties operational uptime to the constant, manual upkeep of credentials that expire by design.

Modernization is a better mop

Most modernization programs center on certificate lifecycle management: discover every certificate, automate renewals, centralize control. The DigiCert data shows it helps, with 64% reporting improved lifecycle automation and 60% reporting fewer outages.

But automating a fragile process does not make it robust. A better mop does not fix a leaking roof. Certificate sprawl, expiration outages, and revocation dependencies are not bugs in how PKI is operated. They are properties of what PKI is.

What “fewer outages” leaves on the table

Fewer outages is not no outages. As long as trust flows through certificate authorities that issue credentials which expire and must be revoked, the failure modes remain: an expired certificate still takes a service down, a CA still becomes a single point of dependency, and every persistent credential is still a target. More than 40% of reported attacks involve stolen PKI credentials.

You can manage that risk down. You cannot manage it away while the architecture stays the same.

Replace the architecture, not the workflow

Autonomous Key Management™ replaces PKI rather than refining its operations. There are no certificate authorities, no certificates to expire, and no revocation service to depend on. Keys are generated from a pre-shared crypto seed and refresh every session, autonomously. There is no sprawl to discover because there is no certificate inventory to manage, and a self-healing design restores availability without waiting on an external authority. Provision once, runs forever.

Every session is independently verified with no standing credential left behind, which is Zero Trust at the protocol layer, not a policy layer stretched over legacy trust. And because the architecture is symmetric, it is quantum-secure by design rather than waiting on the next algorithm migration.

DigiCert's research is right that PKI is under pressure. The question it raises, but cannot answer, is whether the goal is to keep reinforcing a model that is buckling, or to replace it. Modernization buys time. Replacement removes the problem.

About AKMSecure

AKMSecure delivers a patented Autonomous Key Management™ protocol built to replace outdated PKI approaches with a dynamic, quantum-secure, air-gapped-capable architecture. Instead of relying on persistent credentials that can be stolen, reused, or abused, AKM enables independently verified sessions with no standing privileges left behind. The result is a model that better aligns with Zero Trust principles, reduces certificate-based risk, and supports resilient operations across enterprise IT, OT and Tactical Edge environments. Built to NSA-grade security standards and deployable as a lightweight SDK, AKMSecure helps organizations modernize trust at the protocol layer without rebuilding everything around it.