India’s digital trust at a crossroad: Preparing for the 2026 TLS certificate shift
By Rohan Vaidya, Area Vice President – India & SAARC, CyberArk
In today’s digitally interconnected world, TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates form the silent yet essential backbone of modern digital infrastructure. They verify website and service identities, encrypt communications, and enable secure machine-to-machine interactions. From digital banking and e-governance to retail payments and cloud services, TLS certificates ensure trust in every transaction. Their seamless operation often goes unnoticed—until they fail. When they do, users encounter security alerts, apps malfunction, and critical services grind to a halt.
March 2026: Certificates Will Expire Twice as Fast
Starting March 2026, the lifespan of TLS certificates will be halved, dropping from 398 days to 200 days. While this may seem like a minor technical adjustment, it introduces significant operational challenges. Routine renewals could become recurring disruptions, especially for organizations relying on manual tracking.
This change is part of a phased mandate that will further reduce certificate lifespans to 100 days in 2027 and just 47 days by 2029. This shift transforms certificate management from an annual task into a frequent operational exercise. Even with the current longer validity period, certificate-related outages are common—67% of organizations report such outages monthly.
The risks of certificate failures are far-reaching. A single expired certificate can disrupt entire systems, breaking APIs, halting authentication, and cascading through interdependent services. Visibility gaps, unclear ownership, and reliance on manual processes like spreadsheets exacerbate these issues. With shorter lifespans, the frequency of “failure moments” will increase, amplifying risks across critical systems.
The Larger Issue: The Explosion of Machine Identities
TLS certificates are just one aspect of a broader challenge: the rapid growth of machine identities. These include credentials for workloads, APIs, services, containers, and devices. A 2025 global study of 1,200 security leaders highlights that machine identities are foundational to modern systems, with their growth driven by cloud-native technologies and AI adoption.
The study also warns that undiscovered machine identities are potential points of compromise, with 77% of respondents identifying them as risks. API keys and TLS certificates are the most commonly involved in incidents.
The consequences are already evident. In the past year, half of the organizations surveyed experienced security incidents due to compromised machine identities. These incidents caused delayed application launches (51%), outages that negatively impacted customer experience (44%), and unauthorized access to data or systems (43%). The operational fragility is clear, even before the 2026 shift.
India’s Amplified Exposure
India’s massive scale magnifies the impact of trust failures. Digital services are deeply integrated into daily life and economic activities. A 2025 report by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) highlights the extent of Digital India:
1.3 billion biometric digital IDs issued through Aadhaar by early 2024.
1,644 billion digital transactions in FY 2023-24—the highest globally.
In such an ecosystem, a single TLS certificate failure could disrupt digital payments, government services, aviation dashboards, and healthcare workflows simultaneously.
India’s cybersecurity landscape underscores the urgency for resilience. CERT-In data reveals a sharp rise in reported cyber incidents:
13,91,457 incidents in 2022
15,92,917 incidents in 2023
20,41,360 incidents in 2024
This growing threat landscape blurs the line between reliability failures (e.g., expired certificates) and hostile cyber disruptions, increasing regulatory scrutiny and reputational risks for organizations.
The Operational Reality: Manual Certificate Renewal is a Bottleneck
The reduced TLS certificate lifespan in 2026 will significantly impact security operations and compliance. Organizations still relying on spreadsheets, shared inboxes, or fragmented ticketing systems for renewals will face heightened risks. Ownership is often identified only after outages occur, turning routine maintenance into crisis management.
Compounding the challenge is the exponential growth of machine identities, now numbering in the millions. These identities authenticate cloud workloads, APIs, containers, and digital services. In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, poor certificate governance directly affects service uptime, customer trust, regulatory compliance, and cyber resilience.
Automation is the only sustainable solution. A future-ready certificate strategy requires:
Continuous discovery and a unified inventory across on-premises infrastructure, cloud services, and APIs to eliminate undocumented certificates.
Ownership mapping to establish accountability before failures occur.
Policy enforcement to standardize certificate attributes and renewal lead times.
Automated renewal and redeployment to eliminate human errors and delays.
Integration into DevOps pipelines is essential, ensuring certificate issuance and renewal are part of deployment hygiene rather than isolated IT tasks.
A Strategic Advantage Beyond 2026
Shorter certificate lifespans can enhance security—if renewal and governance processes are automated. India’s ambitious digital economy, with unmatched identity and transaction volumes, faces a critical test in March 2026. Automated organizations will view this shift as an opportunity to strengthen resilience. Non-automated ones risk frequent outages and eroding user trust.
By embracing automation, Indian industry and government can turn this challenge into a strategic advantage, ensuring operational reliability and long-term digital resilience.