7 secrets management techniques for modern development teams

TL;DR

To manage credentials effectively, teams should centralize storage, sync values across environments, detect drift early, and support secrets referencing. Comparison and lookup tools help reduce duplication and speed up rotation. Personal and branch configs let developers test safely without impacting shared environments.

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Secrets management is no longer just a security task. It’s a critical infrastructure for developer speed and system reliability. When done right, it reduces friction across teams, helps enforce compliance, and prevents issues like configuration drift or version mismatch.

Whether your team is adopting a secrets management solution or improving an existing one, these seven best practices will help ensure your workflows are fast, secure, and scalable.

Practice 1: Centralize secrets with a dashboard and access controls

Key takeaway: The dashboard mechanism for secrets storage should be structured by application, with a list of customizable environments.

Auditing secrets use is a necessary facet of platform security, but it isn’t part of the development pipeline. To avoid spending excessive time on this critical, but not innovative or competitive aspect of your platform, your secrets management tool should easily facilitate detailed tracking. Every secrets management solution should implement a centralized dashboard with customizable environments and built-in Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to manage and track secrets usage.

With organization and ease of navigation as priorities, auditing for legal compliance is easier, more accurate, and takes less time.

Practice 2: Automate syncing secrets across environments

Key takeaway: Automating the syncing process of secrets across environments simplifies rotation and revocation practices across the CI/CD pipeline without wasting developer time or introducing platform downtime.

For secrets that remain the same across environments, keeping their values synchronized is essential. Synchronization can help prevent configuration drift between environments, but most importantly for development, synchronized secrets prevent version mismatch between developers, which can otherwise lead to lengthy and annoying debugging processes.

Automating secrets synchronization helps facilitate easy rotation and revocation practices, ensuring that changing the value of a compromised secret in one location changes it in every location. This automation also removes the need to share secrets over insecure channels, one of the leading causes of data breaches.

Practice 3: Drift detection and early alerts

Key takeaway: Early detection and alert processes help prevent naturally occurring configuration drift from developing into a significant issue.

Detection processes for configuration drift reduce the risk of its associated bugs and errors down the line. Early notifications help nip configuration drift in the bud before it becomes a more challenging problem to rectify. Automation of both of these processes reduces the frequency with which DevOps needs to manually check for drift and enables them to focus on more pressing matters.

Practice 4: Reduce duplication with secrets referencing

Key takeaway: Rather than refer to unique instances of identical secrets, use a secrets management solution that enables global referencing of a single, centrally stored secret.

Implementing a secrets management solution with secrets referencing helps avoid the accidental creation of duplicate secrets by referring to a single, global instance in a centralized location. Referencing a single instance simplifies keeping track of secrets and allows for easy rotation and revocation practices. Coupled with branch configurations, secrets referencing makes it especially easy to sync secrets across different cloud environments and with integrated cloud-native secrets managers.

Practice 5: Use comparison tools to catch inconsistencies

Key takeaway: Comparison tools help catch secrets version mismatch before it becomes an issue, saving development resources otherwise wasted on debugging.

Comparison tools allow for the implementation and automation of many functions, aiding security and development efficiency. Comparison tools help identify configuration drift, help identify instances of duplicate secrets, and identify secrets version mismatch between developers and between environments. Rather than manually sort through each list and location of secrets, a single centralized solution with comparison tools reduces the time spent on these tasks.

Practice 6: Enable lookup-by-value to manage exposures

Key takeaway: Lookup-by-value tools allow DevOps to locate every instance of a secret, which is essential for mounting timely breach responses.

Lookup-by-value capabilities allow security teams to quickly identify every instance of a secret or credential, a practice that is particularly important if that secret has become compromised. Lookup-by-value also helps reduce the risk of duplicate secrets and can help find secrets that were accidentally copied into repositories or other locations. These tools also help teams to retroactively identify that all secrets have been correctly rotated by searching for the previous value after the rotation process has completed.

Practice 7: Support personal and branch configs for local development

Key takeaway: Personal and branch configs allow developers to alter secrets during local development without altering the global instance of the secret, then sync across selected environments if they so choose.

Personal configs allow for instanced versions of secrets to be used and altered during local development without affecting the globally referenced value for the rest of the team. Using personal and branch configs grants developers the flexibility to test altered platform architecture without worry.

When ready, a developer may update the global value of a secret from their personal config to sync the new value across their team or development environment without having to manually share or update any files. Removing manual processes saves considerable time by automating what used to be a lengthy and team-wide operation.

Ready to see these techniques in action?

Strong secrets management shouldn’t slow teams down; it should make security second nature. If you’re looking to reduce friction, avoid sprawl, and build safer workflows, start by exploring how these techniques look inside Doppler.

Take the self-guided product tour to see how centralized secrets management works.

FAQ: Secrets management techniques