With the burden of secrets management squarely fallen on developers, it is time to centralize and streamline this cyber resilience process
Against a backdrop of increasing cyberattacks and successful data breaches, managing privileged credentials (often called “secrets”) in every application, script, automation tool and other non-human identity has become a top concern.
When the identity of an employee with high level privileges has been commandeered, cybercriminals exfiltration data containing customer environment variables, tokens, and keys, posing a significant threat to customer systems.
Development environments, including developer operations (DevOps) and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, as well as cloud infrastructure and workloads, are now often perceived by IT teams as the biggest risks to managing sensitive data like identities.
Developers’ dilemma
Secrets management is a critical task, but it is not fair to lay the burden solely on developers, whose primary tasks are in application development and deployment, with project execution speed and efficiency their top performance targets.
It is unreasonable to demand developers focus on security when it falls outside their traditional purview and risks impeding their production timelines.
Teams of developers working on separate projects also assume responsibility only for their respective initiatives in multiple vaults. This hampers visibility, enforcement of consistent policies, and audit access across projects and accounts, making it harder to respond to security events when they occur.
Ideally, secrets management across an organization should be entrusted to dedicated security teams. However, this also raises the possibility of introducing delays that frustrate cloud-native developers striving to meet business objectives.
Instead, security teams require solutions that allow them to meet developers where they are, through seamless integration with existing workflows on their preferred cloud provider platforms.
Centralizing secrets management
Effective secrets management hinges on having a system that leverages existing workflows, processes and tools, and is easy to use. This then allows developers to incorporate security into their daily operations, without placing undue stress on the security teams trying to manage a large volume of secrets.
Effective secrets management for cloud-native development offers various advantages:
1. Visibility, control and management over all secrets across projects and accounts through a single pane of glass, mitigating vault sprawl across multiple cloud instances and projects
2. Simplified management, rotation and synchronization of secrets, ensuring transparency and uninterrupted critical functionality for developers
3. Easy discovery and management of secrets for security teams across existing instances of their native cloud secrets management tools
4. Prioritization of developers’ preferred choices that allow them to maintain their native user experiences with a secrets management solution
5. Boosting of operational efficiency for both security and developers
6. Accelerated transitioning of workloads to the Cloud by enabling the same security policies to be enforced across hybrid and cloud environments
Centralizing and enhancing secrets management for cloud-native applications clearly helps to boost the developer experience, reduce cyber risks and improve business resilience.
