Fujitsu & DigiCert team up on certificate management

Fujitsu and DigiCert have partnered to offer automated digital certificate management to organisations in Australia and New Zealand, targeting customers facing shorter Transport Layer Security certificate lifespans.

Fujitsu will provide consulting, integration and managed services for DigiCert ONE, a platform for managing certificate lifecycles. The offer is intended to help businesses track, issue, renew and revoke digital certificates across their technology estates.

Digital certificates verify the identity of websites, applications, devices and other connected systems. They are a routine part of online security, but they also create operational risks when organisations rely on manual processes to manage large numbers of certificates across cloud services, internal systems and connected devices.

That pressure is expected to increase as the maximum lifespan of public Transport Layer Security certificates falls from 200 days to 47 days by 2029 under industry policy changes set by the CA/Browser Forum. More frequent renewals increase the risk that a certificate could expire unnoticed, disrupting websites, applications and customer services.

The partnership also reflects broader concern over the growing number of machine identities in business systems. As companies add more applications, devices, cloud workloads and automated processes, security teams must manage a larger volume of certificates and keys, often across fragmented environments.

In the Australian and New Zealand market, the service is intended to give customers a single route for implementation and ongoing management. It is also expected to improve visibility across certificate environments and reduce the operational burden on internal IT and security teams.

Peter Grassi outlined Fujitsu's position on the deal.

"Trust is everything in today's digital world. A single, expired certificate can cause businesses immediate financial loss and lasting reputational damage. Fujitsu's partnership with DigiCert directly addresses that risk. We're combining Fujitsu's proven managed services with the world's leading automation platform to deliver a single, unified solution. This approach eliminates the manual workload, prevents costly errors, and gives our customers the confidence to operate securely," said Peter Grassi, Chief Executive Officer, Fujitsu.

The agreement comes as organisations in the region prepare for cryptography changes driven by the expected impact of quantum computing on existing encryption methods. The Australian Signals Directorate has said organisations should have a post-quantum cryptography transition plan in place by 2026 and complete migration before 2035.

This creates another planning challenge for companies with complex estates, particularly where older systems, multiple suppliers and uneven records make it difficult to identify where certificates are deployed. Visibility over certificate inventories is widely seen as a first step in preparing for future cryptographic change.

Operational pressure

The service is intended to automate the full certificate lifecycle, including discovery, issuance, renewal and revocation. In practice, this means replacing spreadsheets, ad hoc alerts and manually scheduled renewals with centralised oversight and automated workflows.

For businesses, the commercial case centres on reducing service interruptions and limiting the labour needed to maintain security controls. In the past, expired certificates have caused outages affecting websites, online transactions and internal systems, sometimes taking hours to identify and rectify.

In Australia and New Zealand, the issue has become more pressing as organisations expand cloud adoption and connect a wider range of digital services. Certificates no longer sit only on external websites; they also underpin application programming interfaces, internal communications, software signing and connected devices.

DigiCert said the shift to 47-day certificate lifespans will make manual administration increasingly difficult and argued that automation is becoming necessary as renewal windows shrink and certificate volumes rise.

Daniel Sutherland described the challenge facing customers in the region.

"Fujitsu's deep industry expertise and managed services capability make them the ideal partner for cyber security consulting in Australia and New Zealand. With certificate lifecycles shrinking to just 47 days by 2029, manual management has become unsustainable and incredibly risky. By combining DigiCert's automation technology with Fujitsu's implementation and managed services expertise, we're helping customers modernise how they manage trust by reducing operational risk and improving resilience," said Daniel Sutherland.

Broader security shift

The tie-up shows how certificate management is shifting from a specialist infrastructure task to a broader board-level risk issue. As digital operations become more dependent on machine-to-machine trust, failures in certificate handling can interrupt revenue-generating services as well as security controls.

It also underlines the growing market for managed services around digital trust, especially for companies that lack the internal resources to build and maintain automated certificate processes. For many organisations, the challenge is no longer whether certificates matter, but how to keep pace with the number in use and the speed at which they must be renewed.

By combining DigiCert's software with Fujitsu's service delivery model, the companies are targeting customers that need central oversight of certificate inventories while preparing for shorter renewal cycles and future cryptographic change.