Digital certificates act as machine credentials enabling authentication, confidentiality, and integrity for encrypted communications. Certificate expiration — not hacking — has caused major outages at banks, airlines, and emergency services. Modern enterprises manage thousands of certificates across web servers, APIs, microservices, IoT devices, and more, creating 'machine identity sprawl.' Certificate lifetimes are shrinking dramatically: the CA/Browser Forum roadmap sets 200-day limits in 2026, 100 days in 2027, and just 47 days by 2029. This makes manual management untenable and demands automated lifecycle management covering discovery, issuance, monitoring, rotation, revocation, and retirement. Organizations that automate will eliminate outages and reduce human error; those that don't will face repeated painful failures.