With the Key Vault of Microsoft Azure, all your secrets are safe!

October 25, 2024

Who you gonna call?

What is Azure Key Vault and why do you apply it?

When it comes to processing personal data, passwords and certificates, we want to process it neatly, uniformly and securely. It's all the values you want to keep but shouldn't be visible to others. Think of the Key Vault as a vault in Azure where you store these secrets. It enhances and simplifies:

The security and control of keys and passwords
Scalability with the Azure Cloud
Applications. These do not have direct access to keys
Automating tasks for SSL/TLS certificates

Want to read more about the Azure Key Vault?

Getting a pipeline ready doesn't have to take long these days. If all goes well, you already have a lot automated. This includes creating the Key Vault, so that each connection string exchanges information in a secure way. Where you used to have to do a separate operation or upset for each environment or stage from the OTAP street, we already set this up automatically through the web API configuration. From Microsoft best practices and our Golden Path principles, we see that data is fully traceable (even if changed in the interim). When achieving ISO certification, this is not a luxury, but a must.

Why do we use this as a standard when setting up a CI/CD pipeline and real-world examples?

What does this look like in practice? The process works easily, quickly and is fully compliant. What benefits it has for both business and IT?

When creating a new sprint, a push is given for releasing a CI/CD pipeline. New features are automatically merged. It's faster and more insightful.
SaaS first. Before PaaS and before IaaS. The focus of Azure Key Vault is on the software and not necessarily on the platform or infrastructure. This makes connecting to other gateways easy and flexible.
You spend less development time on this. You can focus more on functionality instead of dealing with virtual machines. More time for development for your DevOps team and more time for business. Win-win.
You work as a team. Peripheral issues soon become less important. You focus on what does/doesn't work and why from the source.

The option is often used with organizations where interfacing with banking & payment systems is required. We then only need to make changes in the Key Vault and not in the application. It can be read out via YAML. This means that if certain policies change, this no longer results in manual work. And thus less chance of errors. With the Key Vault of Microsoft Azure, all your secrets are safe!