Digital certificates quietly underpin almost everything that matters in modern IT: public websites, internal systems, APIs, and machine-to-machine traffic. For years, many teams treated renewal as a calendar exercise—tolerable when validity stretched beyond a year. That era is ending.New security expectations are dramatically reducing maximum certificate validity—from periods of 398 days down to as little as 47 days by 2029. The shift is not theoretical: the first major reduction—to 200 days—began in March 2026. Shorter validity does not merely mean “more paperwork.” It means teams