AppViewX publishes Forrester TEI study on certificate lifecycle automation

AppViewX published results from a February 2026 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact study that quantified the effects of certificate lifecycle automation as SSL/TLS validity periods began shortening under the CA/Browser Forum schedule.

The study reported that a composite organization representative of interviewed customers achieved 302% return on investment, $3.9 million in total three-year, risk-adjusted benefits, a $2.4 million reduction in certificate-related incident costs (three-year, risk-adjusted present value), and a payback period of less than six months.

The AppViewX platform centralized and automated certificate lifecycle management and provided automated certificate discovery and inventory, policy-driven renewal and re-enrollment workflows, centralized governance and compliance reporting, and API-driven integration with DevOps and infrastructure pipelines. Forrester found that manual renewals required approximately 30 minutes per certificate while automated renewals through AppViewX reduced that effort to approximately 0.25 minutes.

The report used a composite organization representative of interviewed customers to quantify outcomes, and AppViewX planned demonstrations at Runtime Security Agent (RSA) Conference 2026, North Expo Booth #4236. “There were 15 major outages the year before, which dropped to three the next year after implementing AppViewX. In fact, these three outages were caused by certificates that we had decided not to migrate to AppViewX,” said a Senior Vice President of Data Protection at a financial services organization interviewed for the study.

“The March 15 milestone signals more than a compliance change, it marks the beginning of a structural workload shift,” said Stephen Tarleton, Chief Operations Officer at AppViewX. “As validity periods shrink, renewal frequency accelerates and fundamentally changes the operating model for certificate management. Without centralized automation, enterprises risk diverting skilled engineers from higher-value security initiatives just to prevent certificate expirations.”

AppViewX planned to demonstrate its centralized lifecycle automation at RSA Conference 2026, and the CA/Browser Forum’s phased reduction schedule will continue to shorten certificate lifespans in stages.