Scaling secrets management: How managed solutions keep up with your growth

Software development is awash in secrets. Not the secret algorithm that powers your TikTok feed, but the credentials that every application uses to interconnect resources. Many applications access internal databases, third-party tools, or other sensitive resources that are held behind secret access. In order to access this information, developers rely on passwords, API keys, SSH credentials, or authentication tokens. These secrets only allow authenticated parties to access IT infrastructure, sensitive information, or costly external services that are protected by secrets.

We all know how critical it is to protect sensitive data, so this means that digital credentials and secrets must be stored securely. Many data breaches come from an improperly stored secret; it could be an AWS credential accidentally posted to GitHub or an API key accidentally added to the front-end source code. It’s terrifyingly easy to do (and many of us can embarrassingly admit to committing one or more of these faux pas.)

Whoops! It’s an API key in Chrome DevTools. Obfuscated, obviously.

Your team growth exposes you to increases in secrets exposure. In order to keep your applications secure, your secrets management solution must scale to meet new requirements. In this post, we’ll examine how secrets management changes as teams grow and how implementing secrets management solutions can be used to keep your data secure while your team expands.

Data security is essential

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It takes just one momentary exposure of an application secret to have catastrophic consequences likehacks, downtime, or data breaches. For this reason, secrets management is a critical part of any application workflow.

For a small application with one developer, storing secrets in a local .env file is a great solution. With just one developer building your app, all secret creation and sensitive data is kept on one machine. This is generally considered to be safe. Just make sure your .gitignore is properly defined to prevent the file from being shared on GitHub.

A .env file holding the openAI API key.

When more developers begin supporting the project, how do you share secrets? If a developer changes the scope on a secret and updates their .env, how do they share the details with the rest of the team? (Bonus points for not posting it in Slack.) Has your team ever been stuck due to one dev changing a credential and forgetting to tell the rest of the org? You cannot afford slowdowns due to security credentials. It’s time to consider secrets management.

Tools for managing secrets

Secrets management solutions are tools that centrally manage secrets. When all of the team secrets are stored securely in one location, managing secrets becomes easier. The developers securely connect to the solution, and the code runs safely on their machine. When it is deployed into production, it ‘just works.’

Rotating secrets becomes simple - you only need to change the secret in the central tool, and everything continues to work. Many secrets management solutions offer groupings of secrets with unique sets of credentials for dev, beta, and production.

Role-based access controls(RBAC) ensure that prod credentials are only exposed to a small group of developers, reducing the surface area of access if there’s a breach. Further, many secrets management tools offer access to audit logs, giving security teams auditing tools to discover and block unwanted access to sensitive information.

Picking a secrets management platform

There are a number of different approaches to deploying secrets management into a development team. Often, smaller teams with limited budgets opt for open source solutions. Organizations with larger development teams might opt for more security controls in a managed solution.

Open source

Several open-source projects, like Hashicorp's Vault or Mozilla's SOPS, are built for managing secrets. Because they are open-source, these are highly customizable secrets management platforms, making them easy to integrate into existing systems. Often, the driving factor for adopting these tools is the upfront costsince they are generally free to use.

Despite being free, these tools do come with engineering costs. They must be deployed on secure servers. Any updates, patches, and security issues must be handled by a dedicated member of the team.Who handles scaling the secrets management tool with the growth of your organization? If a security issue arises in your secrets manager and it is not addressed immediately, your company is back to square one, and the potential of secrets being exposed is high.

Managed secrets management tools

Leveraging a managed service to secure development credentials is another option. Doppler is a popular example of a managed secret management system used by major international corporations to securely store and host development secrets.

Managed secrets providers are designed to be user friendly and easy to integrate with existing applications. Teams can quickly set up secrets in the tool and get back to the important part of their job—developing. Updates, security patches, and server maintenance are all included with the tool, so despite having an upfront cost, the overall cost of ownership may be lower, and no developer or DevOps time is wasted on keeping the server up to date and running.

OpenAI API key securely stored in Doppler.

Managed secrets management solutions often include features to help development teams keep their application secrets even more secure:

• Automatic secret rotation: Everyone knows that updating secrets is a best practice, but who has the time?
• RBAC access controls: Ensuring least privileged access to the secrets.
• Real time access monitoring: Finding potential breaches due to changes in the way secrets are being used.
• Scales with your organization: As headcount expands and the dev team becomes multiple departments and organizations, your secrets management solution grows with you.
• Less developer involvement: There is no need for the DevOps team or a developer to maintain the code - it is part of the service.
• HIPAA? GDPR? CCPA? CPRA? Does your team have experts in international privacy laws? Are your secrets being properly stored in compliance with these complicated legal requirements?

Secrets management will evolve with your team

As your development teams grow and expand, so will the requirements for storing secrets. Your team will develop security models around key rotation, least privilege, and other best practices to prevent the leakage of sensitive data. Secrets management solutions are commonly used by development teams to speed development and higher security of secrets handling. When dev teams don't know the secret, it cannot be leaked.

When choosing a secrets management solution, there are a number of factors that lead to the final decision. Open source solutions are excellent choices that often have a lower upfront price.Managed secret solutions are often easier to implement and deploy, and offer more features and scalability than their open source competition.

When exploring options in secrets management solutions, it is a good idea to examine all of the tools to best understand what features and capabilities best match your team's requirements and budgets. When dealing with fast organizational growth, consider managed secret solutions like Doppler that automatically scale and grow with your team.

Check out a free demo to see if Doppler is the right fit for your team as you scale and grow.