Posted by Suresh Sathyamurthy
August 19, 2025
Real-World Learnings from Akeyless Deployments Across Global Retail Giants
Introduction
Akeyless Secrets Management is trusted by some of the largest retailers in the world, powering secure operations across thousands of stores and complex digital commerce environments. The insights in this blog come directly from real-world, large-scale Akeyless retail deployments distilling what works best to secure secrets, protect Point of Sale (POS) systems, and ensure operational resilience during peak sales periods.
In today’s retail sector, digital operations span from e-commerce platforms to in-store POS systems. As companies evaluate tools like CyberArk Conjur, HashiCorp Vault, or OpenBao, Akeyless stands above the rest offering cloud-native, vaultless secrets management, unlimited scalability, and advanced security features that address modern retail challenges. With both pure SaaS and hybrid-SaaS deployment options, Akeyless adapts to your infrastructure and security needs.
Built for Retail Scale: Effortless Resilience When It Matters Most
One of the largest retailers in the world who had deployed HashiCorp Vault, prior to switching to Akeyless mentioned that traditional vaults often buckle under demand due to cluster complexity and manual maintenance. Their reason for choosing Akeyless was because it delivers multi-region high availability, elastic scalability, and resilient operations that keep retail systems running even during peak loads.
A key Akeyless differentiator is the hybrid architecture with lightweight, stateless gateways that can be deployed inside a customer’s private network. These gateways:
- Akeyless gateways are stateless and don’t store sensitive data locally, making them easy to scale, upgrade, and maintain.
- Communicate with the Akeyless SaaS backend in an outbound-only manner, simplifying network configuration and enhancing security.
- In the event of a temporary loss of backend connectivity, continue to serve secrets from an encrypted, read-only cache, ensuring uninterrupted service for mission-critical systems.
This approach not only eliminates the operational burden of building and managing vault clusters in each location (as with HashiCorp Vault) but also gives retailers the flexibility to deliver high-speed, local secrets access without compromising security or manageability.
Securing POS Edge Systems: Blast-Radius Control Meets Offline Resilience
The same vendor also highlighted another reason for choosing Akeyless. Retail POS systems expose unique risk factors:
- If one POS is compromised, it must not compromise the entire network. Controlling the blast radius is essential.
- Stores must continue functioning even with limited or no internet access.
Akeyless addresses both:
- A lightweight Akeyless Gateway can be deployed in each store unlike HashiCorp Vault, which would require full cluster deployment per store, increasing costs and complexity.
- This gateway includes local caching, enabling stores to operate seamlessly even if network connectivity is degraded. It serves locally cached secrets until connectivity is restored.
- Combined with DFC (Distributed Fragments Cryptography™), each POS holds its own key fragment. Even if one store is breached, the damage is contained; no full key compromise, no lateral access.
This setup delivers robust security and resilient operations edge-to-cloud.
Maximum Security, Zero Sacrifice:
The patented Distributed Fragments Cryptography DFC™ technology from Akeyless splits encryption keys across regions and never reconstructs them during operations. One fragment remains on-premises ensuring zero-knowledge encryption and total customer control over secrets. Our Vaultless Secrets Management approach is essentially the combination of DFC and our cloud-native SaaS platform. This brings the ease of use, management, scalability and efficiency of SaaS but with complete control of your security ensuring you get maximum security with no compromises.
Easy Integration & Unified Secrets Management Across Retail Workflows
Akeyless unifies management of credentials, keys, certificates, and more across cloud, legacy, and DevOps pipelines. Seamless integrations (e.g., CI/CD, orchestration platforms, Kubernetes, and other vaults) make migration painless.
A consistent control plane across your entire infrastructure helps streamline access policies and audit logs.
Prime Alternative to Conjur, Vault & Infisical – Without the Ops Burden
| Requirement | CyberArk/HashiCorp/OpenBao | Akeyless |
| SaaS Architecture | Requires cluster deployment & high maintenance | Cloud-native SaaS available in both pure SaaS & hybrid-SaaS models |
| POS Edge Resilience | Requires full cluster per store | Lightweight gateway with local caching per store |
| Blast-radius Control | Shared infrastructure increases risk | Per-POS key fragment with DFC™ isolates risk |
| High Availability During Outages | Connectivity issues cripple POS systems | Offline-capable gateway cache ensures continued operation |
| Future-Ready for AI Agents | No native handling | SecretlessAI™ for autonomous, secure agent access |
Future-Proof with Akeyless SecretlessAI™
Anticipating AI-driven retail storefronts and intelligent agents, SecretlessAI™ delivers just-in-time credentials for non-human identities, no more embedded API keys. Authentication leverages machine identity (e.g., Kubernetes service accounts, cloud IAM).
Support for SPIFFE via SPIRE enables secretless authentication for autonomous workloads. Meanwhile, built-in PKI-as-a-Service, policy-driven access, and auditing keep AI integration secure.
Want to secure your POS edge, limit blast radius, and support AI-powered retail innovations?
- Download the “Retail at Risk” ebook to explore real-world scenarios and best practices.
- Book a personalized demo to see how Akeyless leverages Vaultless Secrets Management, hybrid retail gateways, and SecretlessAI™ to safeguard your operations and scale with ease.
