Why secrets management is no longer a nice to have

Teams use secrets management platforms to customize and secure their access to secrets in a centralized location. This ensures access is monitored and secure and allows for rapid response in the event of an outage or data breach.

Secrets management is essential to platforms of all sizes. Here, we’ll examine the evolving threat landscape, the cost of poor secrets management, the benefits of proper secrets management practices, and how Doppler’s developer-first platform seamlessly integrates these benefits into your development workflow.

The evolving threat landscape

The cybersecurity landscape constantly shifts as platforms, development environments, and workplaces innovate to meet changing consumer and market demands. Applications are becoming more complex as they increase their integrations with and reliance upon APIs and third-party services.

Recent workplace trends also show a shift towards a more distributed environment, particularly with the rise of decentralized development teams and hybrid or work-from-home arrangements.

Each layer of complexity, decentralization, and external reliance adds new potential security threats for hackers to exploit. The increased necessity of secrets like API keys and other credentials puts them at greater risk of exposure.

The cost of poor secrets management

Overview: Poor secrets management practices take various forms, all of which lead to increased attack surfaces for hackers. Poor secrets management can have catastrophic direct and indirect costs to a platform.

1. Platform Downtime: Downtime prevents monetary gain depending on the nature of the platform and drives consumers to competitors.
2. Reputation Damage: The damage to a platform’s reputation in the event of a breach drives consumers away, shrinking the current user base and hampering future growth.
3. Legal action: Platforms may become engaged in lengthy and expensive lawsuits stemming from data breaches, the severity of which may change based on the nature of the breach, the compromised information, platform demographics, or registered location.
4. Wasted Time: Rather than furthering their projects and developing new application features, developers rapidly shift their focus to recovery and security, wasting time and altering marketing and project deadlines.

Benefits of secrets management for developers

Secrets Managers protect sensitive information like API keys and other credentials. They are vital for maintaining secure development environments and preventing platform outages and data breaches.

Secrets management best practices:

1. Centralized Secrets Storage: Centralized secrets storage prevents platform outages caused by scattered secrets. It enables efficient monitoring, secure access, and rapid response during outages or breaches.
2. Role-based access control (RBAC) restricts secret access based on user roles, preventing the spread of secret sprawl and mitigating damage during breaches. It improves organization and reduces response time to breaches or outages.
3. Automated secrets rotation: Automated secrets rotation reduces exposure time and the risk of compromise. It can eliminate compromised credentials and minimize hacker attack surfaces without development downtime.
4. Secure development workflows: Security integration begins during development by avoiding hard-coded secrets, which increase attack surfaces and breach response time.
5. Continuous monitoring and auditing: Monitoring and auditing tools allow for retroactive inspection of secrets used, helping identify unauthorized access and track damages from compromised credentials.

Doppler is the solution

Doppler is a developer-first platform that provides smooth, secure, and seamless secrets management for platforms of any size. We’re confident in our platform but don’t take our word for it. Check out the 22 new badges Doppler earned at G2 Spring 2024, including Best Results, Best Support, Users Most Likely to Recommend, and Fastest Implementation.

Adopting secrets management best practices is crucial for platform security throughout the development lifecycle and beyond. Secrets Management platforms are vital for maintaining these secure development environments. As platforms grow and integrate more third-party applications, the risk of data breaches increases. Doppler's tools and integrations enable teams to implement these practices seamlessly, ensuring secure secrets management through every stage of the development lifecycle.

Protecting customer data is essential for building and maintaining trust. Your data is one of the most valuable parts of your organization. Did you know Doppler can help protect your data by ensuring secure access to your application secrets? Learn more about how we can help manage your API keys, tokens, and more.