About CertLocker

Built from the operations side of the problem.

CertLocker is a UK company. We build one control plane for certificates, secrets, scoped access and the audit trail that ties them together, and we built it out of running infrastructure for trading platforms, payment systems and market-facing services, where a certificate failing quietly is an incident rather than a ticket.

We use the platform ourselves, and we work directly with the teams who run it.

Book a walkthrough ↗ Meet the people behind CertLocker

Why we built CertLocker

A certificate can renew successfully and still leave the old one serving traffic. A secret can be stored safely and still end up pasted into a script. A temporary support key can quietly become permanent access.

None of these are exotic failures. They are what normal looks like on an estate that grew faster than the tooling around it, and they happen in the gaps between tools, which is exactly where nobody is looking.

That is why certificates, secrets, scoped access, endpoint checks and the audit trail belong on one control plane rather than in four. Renewal was never the hard part. Knowing that the new certificate reached the host, loaded into the service, and is what the endpoint is serving right now: that is what fails quietly, and it fails more often every time certificate lifetimes get shorter.

We run these workflows on our own infrastructure, and we write up what happens when we test them against real deployments, including the parts that break.

Read our field notes → Talk to us →

CertLocker brings certificate lifecycle work, secrets, scoped access, endpoint checks, and an audit trail into one secure workflow platform you can Trust.

The team

Sean Monaghan

Sean Monaghan

Founder · CTO

Sean has spent his career building and running infrastructure for trading and market-facing systems, where downtime is measured in money and nobody gets to schedule the outage. That work spans cloud platforms, high availability, automation, and the unglamorous operational engineering that has to hold up at three in the morning.

He runs six-day certificates on HAProxy in production and tests Merkle Tree Certificates in staging, and publishes what breaks rather than what worked.

At CertLocker, Sean owns the platform: making certificate renewal, secret delivery and scoped access work across the mixed estates teams actually run, rather than the clean ones architecture diagrams assume.

Read Sean’s articles → Sean on LinkedIn ↗

Darren Hudson

Founder · Head of Research & Development

Darren’s background is in platform engineering and software architecture: event-driven exchange systems and secure payment technology, where failure is expensive and the tolerances are not negotiable.

He leads research and development at CertLocker, which means the problem the industry has not finished solving: what quantum computing does to the cryptography the public web is built on. Post-quantum algorithms change the arithmetic of every TLS handshake, certificate lifetimes are already shortening towards days, and Merkle Tree Certificates may reshape how trust is distributed altogether. Darren works on all three, and on what each will mean for the teams who have to deploy them.

That research feeds directly into the platform, so customers meet these changes as a software update rather than a migration project. Darren works from Wales; CertLocker is a UK company, and the platform is built to run on infrastructure its customers control.

Read Darren’s articles → Darren on LinkedIn ↗

Both Sean and Darren work directly with customers, alongside the wider CertLocker team, to deliver a set of packaged services around the platform: a fixed-price health check, implementation support, training, and managed certificate operations. The people who designed the platform are the people you talk to about running it, which is usually the difference between getting an answer and raising a ticket.