Posted by Alon Bar
November 20, 2025
What Is Secrets Management in DevOps?
DevOps secrets management is the practice of securing and controlling sensitive credentials such as API keys, tokens, passwords, and certificates that applications, services, and automated workflows rely on. In modern pipelines, both human and nonhuman identities require access to critical resources, making secrets a prime target for attackers.
Centralizing and automating secrets management allows DevOps teams to protect credentials across development and production environments without sacrificing speed, agility, or innovation.
Why Is DevOps Secrets Management Essential?
Secrets are the backbone of DevOps pipelines, enabling applications, containers, CI/CD tools, and services to communicate securely. Without strong controls, these credentials are easy targets for attackers, leading to costly breaches, downtime, and compliance failures.
DevOps secrets management centralizes and encrypts credentials, eliminates “secret sprawl,” and automates secure access across environments. By protecting both human and nonhuman identities, it ensures deployments remain safe, reliable, and compliant without slowing down the speed and agility DevOps teams need.
Security Risks Arising from Improper DevOps Secrets Management
Failure to manage DevOps secrets properly exposes organizations to costly and preventable risks.
- Data breaches: Stolen or exposed credentials are among the top attack vectors, driving the global average cost of data breach to over $4M.
- System outages: Expired or unmanaged secrets, such as TLS/SSL certificates, can trigger downtime that costs thousands of dollars per minute.
- Unauthorized access: Weak or hardcoded secrets give attackers direct entry to critical systems and sensitive data.
- Secrets sprawl: Scattered credentials across tools and teams increase exposure and make monitoring and auditing nearly impossible.
Case Studies: Secret Exposure in Real-World Incidents
These breaches show how poorly managed secrets can have massive consequences.
- Salesforce-Drift Oauth Attacks (Aug 2025)
Threat actor UNC6395 stole OAuth tokens issued to the Drift chatbot integration inside Salesloft, letting them access hundreds of Salesforce tenants and extract AWS keys, Snowflake tokens, and other embedded secrets. The tokens came from a compromise of Drift’s connected-app environment through Salesloft’s DevSecOps pipeline, which attackers used to impersonate the app across linked orgs.
- xAI API Key Exposure (Mid 2025)
A U.S. government developer inadvertently uploaded a GitHub script containing a valid API key tied to 52 private xAI models, including Grok-4. Although flagged by GitGuardian, the key remained active even after takedown, raising serious concerns about weak credential hygiene in AI development.
Read our full analysis in The xAI Key Exposure: A Case for Secretless AI Architecture, where we explain how Akeyless’ secretless approach and just-in-time credentials could have prevented this breach. - Internet Archive Token Exploit (October 2024)
Attackers leveraged an unrotated GitLab token to access the Internet Archive’s Zendesk platform, exposing 800,000+ support tickets dating back to 2018. The breach highlighted the risks of long-lived credentials in legacy systems. - Cloudflare Breach via Okta-Stolen Tokens (November 2023)
Nation-state attackers used authentication tokens and service account credentials stolen during the Okta breach to infiltrate Cloudflare’s internal Atlassian servers, accessing its Confluence, Jira, and Bitbucket systems. The incident underscored the cascading risks of supply-chain credential compromises.
The Current State of Secrets Sprawl Leads to Inefficiency
The combination of proliferation and decentralization of secrets, widely familiar to any DevOps team, creates an operational burden, if not a nightmare. Having the same passwords in your multiple Ansible jobs, your Kubernetes containers, or in the daily batch routine you’re coding, requires considerable effort when these passwords need to be rotated.
Since static secrets are located in various environments (cloud, on-prem, hybrid) and managed by different administrators (islands of secrets), such as Ansible Secrets, Docker Secrets and Kubernetes Secrets – to name a few – no unified platform is available for the management of these multiple secrets repositories.
For organizations that operate in both a cloud-native environment and classic IT infrastructure, a duplication issue is created due to having their own secrets managed with different tools and cloud-native solutions. Last but definitely not least, there is a security concern – how can cloud-native systems securely access resources that are external to their environment?
8 Best Practices to Look for in a Secrets Management Solution
A single, unified SaaS platform for various use cases
A best-in-class secrets management solution will have support for both static and dynamic secrets that can be use for machine-to-machine and human-to machine access. These different types of secrets include encryption keys, API-keys, tokens, passwords, SSH certificates, x.509 certificates, signing keys, and more.
Works in hybrid, multi-cloud, multi-region environments
The right platform should allow seamless cross-platform, cross-environment workflows to solve the ‘walled garden’ issue that can be problematic for enterprises using only a native cloud platform tool. Top solutions should be completely agnostic and work in both cloud and legacy IT environments.
Plugins for every DevOps tool
This almost goes without saying, but I will say it anyway – you need to have integrations with the most common cloud platforms such as Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, and others at a minimum. If not, DevOps teams will not even consider your product.
Works via CLI, UI, REST API, SDK
The secrets manager in question must allow authentication via third-party Identity Providers, both for human users and machines. There should also be options to use the tool via command line, a decent UI, REST API, and have SDKs for the major languages.
Solves the Secret-Zero problem
To use the platform in a secure way, you need to provide some initial credentials with a form of ephemeral token for continuous authentication with the parent machine so that the initial secret – “secret zero” – cannot be compromised.
Visibility into who accesses what secret, when and where
An enterprise-grade secrets management platform must provide robust analytics dashboards and have the ability to create real-time audit logs of every action for individual accountability.
Enforced least privileges for both machines and humans
Both users and applications are allowed access on a need-to-know, just-in-time access basis with specific application access for a specified duration.
A solution that supports your future scale
As your operation expands to more environments and regions, scalable integration capabilities – with support for a wide variety of plugins – is essential. You need to be able to grow at cloud scale.
Existing Secret Management Solutions
The secrets management landscape continues to evolve as DevOps teams embrace hybrid, multi-cloud, and zero-trust architectures. While both legacy and cloud-native tools remain widely used, many still struggle to provide the unified control, automation, and scalability needed for complex enterprise environments.
Different platforms approach secrets management in their own way. Some emphasize tight security and compliance, while others focus on simplicity and speed. They also vary in how well they support the DevOps secrets management best practices outlined above, especially around scalability, automation, and visibility.
The overview below highlights how the main categories of solutions compare, along with their core strengths and limitations.
Akeyless Vault – The Secrets Management Solution Tailored for DevOps
We are changing the secrets management game by offering unified management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments that supports workflows and future scale.
On-Prem: HashiCorp Vault, CyberArk Conjur, and Delinea (formerly Thycotic)
HashiCorp Vault, CyberArk Conjur, and Delinea remain popular choices for enterprises that require complete control within their own data centers or private clouds. These tools offer mature policy enforcement and strong access controls but often demand complex setup, dedicated infrastructure, and specialized expertise to manage and scale.
While initially built for on-premises deployments, both CyberArk and Delinea now provide cloud or hybrid versions alongside their self-hosted editions. Even so, extending these legacy architectures across hybrid or multi-cloud environments typically increases operational overhead, requiring multiple clusters, manual replication, and ongoing maintenance.
As a result, many organizations find these solutions less agile than modern, fully managed SaaS platforms designed for DevOps speed and automation.
SaaS: AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager
With CSP-based solutions there isn’t solid support for multi-cloud and hybrid environments, not to mention multi-region that requires the ability for users to replicate objects, secrets, and keys. Additionally, there is a significant lack of support for integration with third-party platforms, such as identity providers and container platforms. Finally, there is no solution for the issue of identification beyond the specific environment of the cloud service provider.
Cloud-Native SaaS: AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and Google Cloud Secret Manager
AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and Google Cloud Secret Manager are fully managed SaaS offerings that integrate tightly with their respective ecosystems. For organizations operating entirely within a single cloud, these tools offer convenience, native integration, and built-in security features such as key management and access control. However, they are designed primarily for use within their own platforms.
Managing secrets across multiple clouds or hybrid environments can be complex, as each service uses its own identity framework, policy model, and access management layer. This can create governance gaps, redundant configurations, and higher administrative effort.
While these cloud-native tools are ideal for single-cloud deployments, organizations seeking unified visibility and policy control across mixed environments often turn to independent SaaS platforms built for multi-cloud and hybrid DevOps ecosystems.
Independent SaaS Competitors
Independent platforms like Doppler, Infisical, and Keeper Secrets Manager offer cloud-hosted secrets management without tying customers to a single cloud provider. These tools are known for their simplicity, developer-friendly experience, and quick deployment, which makes them appealing to smaller teams or fast-moving organizations.
Some newer solutions, such as Infisical and Keeper, have introduced advanced capabilities like dynamic or short-lived credentials and zero-knowledge encryption. Still, they prioritize ease of use over deep enterprise integrations or large-scale governance.
As a result, many are most popular with developer-led teams and mid-market organizations; some offer enterprise options, but large, hybrid environments often need capabilities like JIT/ephemeral identities across trust domains and unified multi-cloud policy orchestration. These are areas where Akeyless stands out.
How Akeyless Secrets Management Secures Your DevOps Pipelines
Akeyless delivers a SaaS-based, unified secrets management platform purpose-built for DevOps and CI/CD workflows. Its SaaS delivery model removes infrastructure overhead, saving organizations time and resources.
- Zero-Knowledge Encryption with Distributed Fragments Cryptography™ (DFC™): Akeyless uses patented, NIST FIPS 140-2 validated encryption to ensure that even Akeyless itself cannot access stored secrets.
- Dynamic & Just-in-Time Secrets: Temporary credentials are issued to pipelines, containers, and automation workflows, eliminating long-lived secrets and reducing exposure windows.
- DevOps-Native Integrations: Secrets can be injected securely into GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, and more, with full CLI and SDK support.
- Automated Rotation & Governance: API keys, SSH credentials, database passwords, and certificates are rotated automatically, with full audit trails and role-based access control for compliance.
- Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Support: Akeyless provides unified secrets management across AWS, Azure, GCP, on-premises systems, and Kubernetes clusters.
With its SaaS architecture, patented DFC™ encryption, and DevOps-native integrations, Akeyless secures every stage of the pipeline, enabling organizations to safeguard credentials while maintaining speed, scalability, and compliance.
Want to learn more about our secrets management platform?
Get a demo of Akeyless today!
FAQs on DevOps Secrets Management
What is a secret in DevOps?
A secret in DevOps is any sensitive credential required for authenticating users, services, or applications within your IT infrastructure and pipelines. This includes items like passwords, API keys, SSH keys, certificates, tokens, and cryptographic keys that grant access to critical systems or resources.
What should a developer do for secrets management?
• Avoid hardcoding credentials in code, configuration files, or scripts.
• Centralize secrets in a secure platform instead of scattering them across environments.
• Inject secrets dynamically at runtime through automated tools
• Rotate credentials regularly to minimize exposure time and privilege risk.
• Enforce least-privilege access so each user or service only gets the permissions they need.
• Monitor and audit the use of secrets to detect anomalies or unauthorized access.
How to manage secrets in DevOps?
• Developers and DevOps teams should follow these proven DevOps secret management best practices.
• Centralize secrets with a unified system to store, manage, and track credentials across environments, tools, and cloud platforms.
• Support all secret types, including static (passwords, API tokens), dynamic (on-demand, temporary credentials), and rotated secrets.
• Inject secrets at runtime instead of embedding them in code or config files, using dynamic, environment-specific injection.
• Automate lifecycle management for secret storage, access control, rotation, and ephemeral credential creation.
• Maintain visibility and governance with audit logs, role-based access control, analytics, and least-privilege access enforcement.
• Manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments without creating siloed secret stores.
• Leverage Universal Secrets Connector (USC) to access external vaults without migrating secrets securely.
What are the security best practices in DevOps?
The OWASP Secrets Management Cheat Sheet highlights many of the same practices recommended by Akeyless for protecting sensitive credentials in DevOps environments. Together, they emphasize the following best practices.
• Centralize and standardize secrets: Use a unified system to store, provision, and manage all credentials, preventing sprawl across tools and teams.
• Enforce least-privilege access: Apply fine-grained controls so users and services only access what they truly need.
• Automate lifecycle management: Streamline creation, rotation, expiration, and revocation to reduce errors and eliminate long-lived credentials.
• Use dynamic and ephemeral secrets: Issue short-lived, just-in-time credentials to limit the impact of compromise.
• Audit and monitor usage: Continuously log, monitor, and alert on all secret requests and access attempts.
• Encrypt secrets everywhere: Ensure the protection of secrets at rest, in transit (TLS), and in memory, where feasible.
• Secure CI/CD pipelines: Inject secrets at runtime instead of embedding them in code, configs, or container images.
• Plan for lifecycle and incidents: Rotate and expire secrets regularly, revoke compromised credentials promptly, and maintain break-glass access for emergencies.
How to use Akeyless secrets management in Azure DevOps?
Akeyless provides an Azure DevOps plugin that integrates secrets management directly into your pipelines, making it simple to fetch and inject credentials securely. Here’s how to use the feature.
• Install the Akeyless Azure DevOps Plugin: Add the “Vault – Read KV Secrets” task in your pipeline to fetch secrets securely.
• Authenticate using a Client Token or other supported methods, and manage both static and dynamic secrets.
• Deploy via the Azure Marketplace: Access Akeyless as a SaaS solution through the Azure Marketplace for simplified deployment and integration with Azure DevOps workflows.
• Set up Azure-specific secret types: Configure rotated or dynamic Azure secrets, such as Azure AD app client secrets, in Akeyless and use them directly in Azure DevOps pipelines.
