3 signs you’ve outgrown manual secret handling

TL;DR

As your team scales and projects grow, manual secrets management gets harder to maintain. If you're starting to feel the strain, here are three signs it’s time to evolve your strategy:

1. Developers are spending hours each week manually managing secrets
2. Your platform handles sensitive data like PHI or PII
3. Your team needs better visibility and control over who can access what

If any of these sound familiar, it might be time to move beyond manual processes. A centralized secrets manager can help your team stay secure, aligned, and focused on building.

Manual secrets management appears organically

Implementing a secrets management system at the beginning of a new project, especially a project with an uncertain future, is rarely a developer’s priority. More often, a functional test build or proof-of-concept presentation takes center stage, and security infrastructure comes later. When a project is deprioritized, the lack of security infrastructure may not seem urgent, but it still leaves the door open to future risks.

As projects and teams mature, the various facets of platform security slowly develop. Rudimentary secrets management processes, often reliant upon manual action, are generally a team’s first solution to managing the ever-growing list of API keys, tokens, and credentials introduced into the project. Yet as the project scales and demand grows, these legacy secrets management processes hinder future growth and development. Teams face the next question: When should they automate secrets management?

Here are three signs you’ve already outgrown manual secret handling.

Sign 1: Developers are losing time

Key takeaway: Collect data on your team’s activity to identify how much of their week is spent managing secrets.

Take a step back and evaluate how much time is being spent every week by each member of the team on secrets management. Whether you choose to survey developers, collect activity data, or take a different approach to identifying how much time is already being spent on secrets management, it’s important to understand the amount of time spent on this critical, but not innovative, platform infrastructure.

To show how quickly this can escalate, we’ll look at the number of secrets a team or company might manage. According to Doppler’s data, a team of five engineers operating in 3 environments (development, staging, and production) will use an average of 25 secrets per environment on each project. For a company working on as few as a dozen projects, that’s nearly a thousand individual secrets.

This number is still misleading. Since each developer needs a copy of these secrets for local development, the number of secrets in flux throughout the organization is much, much higher. Every manual action in the secrets management process takes someone’s time, too. Actions like syncing secrets between engineers, secrets rotation, or adding new secrets to the storage system. This time adds up fast, and you’re paying for every minute of it, both in developer salary and the opportunity cost of less developer time towards innovation in a competitive market.

“Since integrating Doppler, we’ve reduced time spent on managing secrets by 80%, from 10 hours per month to just 2 hours.”

If you find your team spending hours on secrets management every week, it’s probably time to find a more efficient solution. Automating the secrets management process with a professional enterprise secrets manager helps eliminate the number of manual actions, returning time and resources to your team immediately. A well-constructed solution reduces the friction of future secrets management policies, preventing waste down the line as well.

Sign 2: You’re handling sensitive or regulated data

Key takeaway: Handling protected data types requires a more robust security infrastructure to maintain legal compliance and avoid data breaches.

Not all data is created equally or treated equally in the eyes of the law. In particular, a few types of information are subject to special legal and industry regulations. Protected Health Information (PHI) or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are two common data types under strict legal regulations like HIPAA or the GDPR.

The bare minimum is rarely enough to meet compliance standards. Among the reasons this information is highly regulated is that it’s under greater threat from malicious actors like hackers. If your platform currently deals with protected information or if protected information is in its future development plan, it’s imperative to implement secrets management as soon as possible.

There are plenty of benefits to taking secrets management seriously:

1. Legal compliance: avoiding fees, fines, and litigation is very important for the company’s bottom line
2. Data Breaches: Effective secrets management greatly reduces the risk of data breaches and helps mitigate their damage.
3. Reputation: Data breaches affect industry and customer reputation, inhibiting future sales, investment, and growth.
4. Expansion: Expanding to process legally protected data often requires compliance with existing regulations, even if the organization did not previously need to fulfill them. For example, a French firm may only provide data to a U.S. firm if that U.S. firm demonstrates compliance with the relevant sections of the GDPR

Sign 3: Your team is growing

Key takeaway: As teams and organizations grow, their secrets management tasks grow even faster.

Organization size is a big factor in the necessity of implementing professional enterprise solutions. Many facets of manual secrets management scale poorly with team and organization size. Since the local secrets in use by every developer must be kept updated to avoid a version mismatch, each additional developer adds more work than the last. Every time a developer alters the secrets of a project, it presents a new pause in the workflow where the other developers must manually update their files to match. Each of those manual actions presents an opportunity for an all-too-common human error.

With scale, access management to sensitive information grows in both complexity and necessity, and keeping track of that information only grows more challenging. Implementing an enterprise secrets management solution organizes, tracks, and automates these features so your company can scale without worry. Automated syncing features keep developers updated without pausing the workflow. Automated role-based access control (RBAC) enforces least privilege by tightly controlling who can access secrets, reducing risk as teams scale.

Want to learn how to build a scalable, secure workflow?

Check out our guide for growing teams navigating their secrets management journey. It’s packed with practical strategies to centralize secrets, reduce friction, and stay secure across every environment.

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