Secrets management in 2025: Why teams are moving on from traditional tools

TL;DR

This blog highlights key insights from The future of secrets management: 2025 edition, Doppler’s latest white paper. It explores why traditional secrets managers fall short, how poor practices slow teams down, and what leading organizations are doing to modernize. From rising breach risks to lost developer time, the findings point to one conclusion: centralized, automated secrets management is necessary, not optional.

Key takeaways:

• Traditional secrets managers weren’t built for scale. Manual processes like credential rotation and environment sync fall apart in fast-moving development environments.
• The cost of poor secrets management goes beyond security. It slows development, adds operational overhead, and introduces friction across teams.
• Recent breaches show the risks are still real. Plaintext storage, missed rotations, and exposed .env files continue to be exploited.
• Automation delivers a measurable impact. Teams using centralized tools report cutting time spent on secrets management by up to 80 percent each month.

Have questions? Skip to the FAQ section for quick answers on secrets management.
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Checking in on the future of secrets management

Secrets management refers to securely storing, accessing, and rotating sensitive credentials such as API keys, database passwords, and certificates. In our recently released 2025 future of secrets management whitepaper, we discuss current issues at the forefront of secrets management. We examine the limitations of traditional secrets management models and demonstrate why adopting a modern, multi-cloud, automated approach is essential for staying competitive in an evolving development landscape.

Read the full white paper.

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Why are traditional secret managers no longer effective?

For example, traditional tools lack features that facilitate modern development. Features like:

1. Secrets storage structured by application, with a list of customizable environments.
2. Synchronized secrets between environments.
3. Notifications for detecting configuration drift between environments.
4. Secrets referencing to reduce secret duplication.
5. Comparison tools for secrets between environments.
6. Search tools to find all secret instances across all environments.
7. Provisioned secrets during local development.

These features don’t just require centralized storage, they also need a secrets manager that integrates with existing development tools, cloud providers, and other secrets management or password management services. Traditional secrets managers aren’t built for that.

These gaps aren’t just inconvenient; they introduce real security and operational risks. A Gartner® analyst states in their Innovation Insight: Secrets Management Tools report, “Leaving secrets unmanaged creates security risks for organizations and opportunities for hackers.”* In our opinion, when secrets are scattered, stored in plaintext, or managed inconsistently, the risk of exposure increases. The need for a modern, automated approach has never been more urgent.

The impact of inefficient secrets management

As software development has evolved with cloud infrastructure and DevOps, secrets management has largely remained manual, fragmented, and disconnected from newer, automated workflows. Poor secrets management increases security risks, slows development, adds operational overhead, and creates friction between teams. Without a scalable centralized solution, organizations struggle with inconsistencies and blind spots, making governance nearly impossible.

Gartner predicts that ”By 2026, half of secrets management vendors will provide a central dashboard and governance layer across other vendors’ secrets management tools, allowing organization more effective secrets management at a better cost.”* The cost and impact of poor secrets management practices stem from a lack of expectations around efficiency, which has a domino effect with negative consequences:

• Inefficient processes slow teams down
• Weak security practices create vulnerabilities
• Lack of oversight increases breach risk

Breaches resulting from poor secrets management practices

EmeraldWhale attackers exploited misconfigured Git configuration files to access over 10,000 private repositories, stealing more than 15,000 cloud service credentials. These credentials should never have been in a Git repository in the first place, and instead should’ve been stored in a centralized secrets management tool.

Hackers accessed AT&T customer data on Snowflake by exploiting stolen credentials to extract sensitive customer information. This breach could’ve been avoided by automating the credential rotations. The stolen credentials would no longer have validated access to Snowflake servers.

Attackers exploited publicly accessible .env files, targeting 110,000+ domains, including AWS and other cloud providers, to access sensitive data like IAM keys, infiltrate cloud environments, and demand ransom. The culprit? Unencrypted secrets were stored in publicly accessible .env files, rather than a config file integrated with a secrets manager.

Quantifying the potential of modernizing secrets mangement

The benefits of modern secrets management are compelling, but how would a DevOps team assess the cost benefits for an organization? It’s a simple, three-step process:

1. Research: Identify inefficient processes with well-known modern solutions.

2. Measure: Survey a collection of in-house teams to understand the time and resources they dedicate to managing secrets each week.

3. Summarize: estimate potential time savings by applying a 70%-80% reduction in time spent managing secrets across the organization each month.

How to modernize your secrets management approach

If you’re ready to move away from outdated workflows, the checklist below outlines key steps to building a scalable, secure, and modern secrets management practice. The steps are:

Step 1: Evaluate your current setup: Assess where manual processes introduce risks or inefficiencies, such as hardcoding credentials or using spreadsheets to track secrets.

Step 2: Implement centralized management: Adopt a solution that centralizes secrets management, providing visibility and control over access to sensitive data while scaling with your infrastructure.

Step 3: Automate secrets rotation: Use the new centralized management service to automate any legacy manual secrets management workflows

Step 4: Integrate with DevOps workflows: Select a solution that integrates with existing DevOps tools, streamlining access to secrets and maintaining security across the development lifecycle.

Step 5: Enforce secure secrets management practices: Schedule mandatory trainings to make sure DevOps knows the proper implementation of new services and procedures.

Real-world examples

Don’t just take our word for it, Doppler has already helped reduce the burden of secrets management for more than 47,000 startups and enterprises. Here are a few of their stories:

“Doppler is the fundamental tool we use to manage secrets and configurations. It takes care of these tasks for us seamlessly, eliminating the need for manual configuration or backend management. We don't have to worry about it, it just works.”

“With 20 developers, implementing a change in a .env file used to require 8 hours of work for all parties involved and occurred approximately twice a month. Now this process is instant and failsafe.”

“Managing secrets used to take us an hour every day. Now with Doppler, it’s down to just a couple of minutes.”

“Managing the lifecycle and versioning of thousands of secrets with Doppler has been magical. My time spent auditing our secrets portfolio has dropped drastically from one whole day to less than an hour."

Your future in secrets management

Embracing a modern approach to secrets management is no longer optional; it’s necessary for businesses looking to reduce risk, enhance security, and drive innovation. Traditional methods simply can’t keep up with the demands of today’s fast-paced, multi-cloud environments.

By adopting an automated, holistic strategy for managing secrets, organizations can save time, lower costs, and improve developer productivity. Doppler offers a proven solution to streamline this process and empower teams to focus on what matters most: delivering value to customers.

It's time to move past outdated practices. Adopting a modern, automated approach to secrets management can protect sensitive data, enhance your security posture, and drive operational efficiency. Start securing your secrets with Doppler today.

Secrets management FAQs: What teams are asking in 2025

*Gartner, Innovation Insight: Secrets Management Tools, Felix Gaehtgens, 12 August 2024

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