PKI is Failing. Here’s What You Need Now
Public Key Infrastructure had a great run. More than three decades, in fact. But now it needs to make way for the future: Autonomous Key Management.
Proven, patented, quantum-secure and Zero-Trust native, AKM is already showing it can eliminate endpoint breaches while lowering TCO by up to 90%. Its simplicity is its strength: It runs on a decentralized symmetric key system anchored in hardware, thus eliminating the manual work, complexity, fragility, costs and risks associated with 1990s-era PKI processes.
But PKI still works — why leave it now?
This is the same argument that emerges whenever a once-useful technology ages out. Yes, you could stay with PKI. But staying won’t save you money and waiting invites excessive risk, especially with quantum advancing rapidly.
PKI certificates are out of control, literally
Most large organizations now track well over 100,000 certificates, with the responsibility for administering them often handled by a complex combination of internal and outsourced resources, according to a Ponemon study released in January. That study also noted that:
PKI’s human factor is its biggest flaw
Renewing certificates, revoking them and constantly working to fix PKI problems all depend on people, which invites failure. A single missed deadline or slow revocation can open systems to catastrophic attack. Criminals know this. They love PKI; any organization that depends on this aging technology is a high-value target. Incidents in 2025 and early 2026 grounded airlines, froze payment networks and halted logistics systems.
There’s never a right time for downtime
One expired certificate can trigger immediate service failures. Connections break. In Denied, Degraded, Intermittent, or Limited (DDIL) environments — which describe many remote oil platforms, military and commercial ships at sea, a warfighter’s handheld device and factory edges — PKI recovery times stretch far beyond safe limits.
Quantum is forcing massive, expensive changes
Post-quantum PKI upgrades will require much larger keys, heavier bandwidth usage, and deep architectural changes. Few organizations have funding or a realistic plan for the transition. Delay means data captured today could be decrypted tomorrow.
Labor and outage costs are draining budgets
The cost of renewal work, emergency fixes, compliance reporting and supporting tools add up quickly. In addition, the lifespan of TLS certificates will become much shorter: 200 days as of March 15, 2026; 100 days as of March 15, 2027; and 47 days as of March 15, 2029. As a result, organizations will pour more millions into managing infrastructure that should run quietly in the background. With AKM, priorities can shift to uptime and output, not endless certificate maintenance.
PKI was built for another time
This legacy technology took shape in the 1990s. It was designed for basic IT needs. As a result it struggles with huge scale, low-power devices, air-gapped operations and strict real-time demands, with patchwork fixes like post-quantum PKI failing to scale or sacrificing speed and reliability.
The post-PKI path forward
AKM solves all of the above challenges simply and efficiently. Certificate renewals disappear, manual revocations are a thing of the past and automated audits and fallback mechanisms maintain smooth operation without a single human touch. AKM's architecture is crypto-agile working with NIST-approved building blocks, including AES-256 and SHA-256/384/512.
In addition, AKM’s deployment cost matches roughly one full PKI renewal cycle. After that, recurring labor ends. Outage risk drops to near zero. Savings reach 75% to 90% compared with manual PKI or even commercial lifecycle tools. Mid-sized deployments can recover millions over just a few years.
It’s time to move past legacy limits
PKI served well for decades, but its weaknesses now outweigh its value. The time to switch to AKM is now.
About AKMSecure
The AKMSecure team eliminated a problem the cybersecurity industry had accepted as unsolvable: embedding Zero Trust into a Quantum-Secure platform without the cost and frailties of legacy Public Key Infrastructure. The founding AKMSecure team has worked with GDIT, Alstom Rail, Airbus and Boeing and contributed to international Cybersecurity OT standards such as IEC 62443 and CENELEC TS-50701.