This will probably come in a future blog post (and also I don't lead this part of secret management so I don't have all the context), but our Intermediate's mostly live in nice locked down machines in AWS (avoiding exact product names because I don't want to tread on other peoples toes)

There's definitely a much bigger risk with an intermediate on the internet, however we at least have the mitigation of being able to revoke it if it goes wonky, the main priorities I see in this space are: (1) minimising the chance of a compromise as much as possible (very clear and well defined communication channels so that as few things are open to even being poked at for vulnz over the network as possible) and (2) being ready to react if there is a compromise (revoke the cert and recover)