Automated Discovery Across All Environments
Certificates exist everywhere in your infrastructure — in Kubernetes secrets, AWS Certificate Manager, Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud Certificate Authority, on-premises PKI systems, legacy servers, and embedded in application code. No organization has a complete inventory of all certificates in use. Silent expirations and unowned credentials become the norm, not the exception.
Arkion performs continuous, automated discovery across your entire estate. We integrate natively with AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud identity systems, discovering certificates in real time as they are provisioned. For on-premises infrastructure, Arkion deploys lightweight collectors that enumerate certificates from system keystores, application runtime contexts, and configuration management systems without requiring agent installation or privileged access to every machine.
Every discovered certificate is immediately enriched with metadata: issuer, validity period, subject identity, chain completeness, and usage context. Arkion builds a complete graph of your certificate ecosystem, including cross-references between services that depend on the same certificate and chains of certificates issued from intermediate CAs.
Owner Assignment with Escalation Workflows
A discovered certificate with no assigned owner is a ticking time bomb. Arkion automatically assigns ownership based on discoverable signals: the service account that provisioned the certificate, the Kubernetes namespace that uses it, the cloud account owner, or the deployment manifest. When automatic assignment is impossible, Arkion creates an escalation incident and notifies infrastructure leadership.
Ownership assignment integrates with your LDAP/Active Directory directory and your incident management system. The assigned owner can be a team, an on-call rotation, or a service account paired with a human escalation path. Arkion validates that ownership is current and active, and automatically refreshes owner assignments when teams are reorganized or disbanded.
For certificates with ambiguous or shared ownership, Arkion enables collaborative ownership models. Multiple teams can claim responsibility for a certificate's lifecycle, triggering notifications to all owners when rotation is needed or when the certificate enters a critical state.
Automated Rotation Before Expiry with Zero Downtime
Certificate rotation is the most dangerous operation in non-human identity management. A single miscoordinated rotation can cause service outages, broken deployments, and cascading failures across dependent services. Arkion automates rotation end-to-end, ensuring that new certificates are issued before old ones expire, validated before deployment, and rolled out to all service replicas without downtime.
Rotation workflows are configurable per-certificate. Arkion can be set to rotate before a certificate is 30 days from expiry, or on a fixed schedule. For highly available services, Arkion coordinates rolling updates across replicas, validating new certificate installation on each replica before moving to the next. For services with strict uptime requirements, Arkion can maintain overlap windows where both old and new certificates are valid, allowing gradual client migration to the new credential.
Every rotation is logged immutably in the audit trail. Before and after certificates are recorded, timestamps of deployment are captured, and any errors during rotation are escalated to the owning team with detailed remediation steps. Failed rotations trigger immediate alerts and halt rollout of the new certificate until the issue is investigated.
DORA, NIS2, and SEC Audit-Trail Compliance
Regulatory frameworks increasingly require detailed audit trails of certificate lifecycle events. DORA mandates detailed logging of identity-related security events. NIS2 requires evidence of lifecycle management and timely responses to identity compromise. SEC rules require demonstration of certificate oversight and rotation practices.
Arkion maintains a complete, immutable audit log of every certificate operation: discovery, ownership assignment, rotation initiation, deployment validation, expiry alerts, and decommissioning. Every entry is timestamped, cryptographically signed, and queryable for audit reports. The audit trail can be exported in formats compatible with security information and event management (SIEM) platforms and compliance reporting tools.
Certificate expiry alerts are not ad-hoc emails from misconfigured monitoring systems. Arkion ensures that alerts are generated at configurable thresholds (e.g., 90 days before expiry, 30 days, 7 days, 24 hours), that alerts are tracked through resolution, and that the timeline of notifications and responses is preserved in audit logs for regulatory review.
Eliminating Silent Expirations and Unowned Certificates
Silent expirations — certificates that expire without notice, without remediation, and without incident response — are a leading cause of production outages. They happen because no one knew the certificate existed, no one was responsible for tracking it, and no alerting system caught the expiration event until services started failing.
Arkion eliminates silent expirations by ensuring that every certificate has a known owner, an expiry alert scheduled at multiple thresholds, and an automated rotation workflow. Unowned certificates are treated as security incidents: they are flagged with high risk scores, escalated to infrastructure leadership, and quarantined if they have not been claimed within a configurable review period.
For legacy certificates or certificates embedded in legacy systems, Arkion can maintain awareness without actively managing rotation. These certificates are tracked in the identity registry, scored for risk, and included in compliance reports — but rotation workflows are held pending manual approval. This allows organizations to manage legacy infrastructure at their own pace while ensuring no certificate is invisible to security and infrastructure teams.