Enterprise Secrets Management Explained: Best Practices, Challenges, and Tool Selection

Whether hosted in the cloud or on-premises, modern applications and integrations have accelerated the need for digital secrets. These secrets control data access when transferred between applications—sending information from a webpage, making a secure request to an API, accessing a cloud database, or countless other cases that modern enterprises encounter while pursuing digital transformation and increasing automation. However, for access control to be robust, businesses must effectively manage the respective secrets across their lifecycle and protect them from compromise. This is precisely what secrets management ensures.

What is secrets management?

Secrets management refers to tools and methods to securely store, access, and centrally manage the lifecycle of digital authentication credentials. This includes sensitive data such as passwords, encryption keys, APIs, tokens, and certificates. These secrets authenticate a user or machine to access applications or services within an organization’s IT ecosystem.

By minimizing the role of humans in secrets management, organizations can avoid data breaches, identity theft, and other identity-related problems by using a methodical approach to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems.

Key concepts of secrets management

What is a secret?

The simplest definition of a secret is that of a digital authentication credential. In that sense, the most well-known example of a secret is a password. Secrets refers to private information vital to unlocking protected resources or sensitive information in tools, applications, containers, DevOps, and cloud-native environments.

The most common types of secrets include:

• Privileged account credentials
• Passwords
• TLS/SSL certificates
• SSH keys
• API keys
• Encryption keys

Although human-related passwords are the most well-known type of secret, non-human secrets are more ubiquitous and more challenging to manage and secure. With the proliferation of non-human entities, collectively named machines, in

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