Security Services: Azure Key Vault
Use Microsoft Azure Key Vault to store secrets safely.
Introduction
As software developers, we often need to store certain secrets for the resources we access, such as databases and APIs. Traditionally, we store these secrets in configuration files and the application source code. However, this approach introduces several security challenges, such as:
- It is possible to push the secrets to the source control repository and expose them to everyone.
- The difficulty of tracking who accessed the secret and when. Azure Key Vault comes to address this challenge. It is a cloud service that securely stores and tightly controls access to critical resources such as passwords, API credentials, certificates, and cryptographic keys.
Benefits of Azure Key Vault
By using Azure Key Vault, we gain the following benefits:
- Centralized management of secrets: Azure Key Vault enables you to centralize all your applications’ secrets in a central place and, thus, makes it easy for you to manage and administrate them. Compare this to the difficulty of storing them in multiple scattered configuration files.
- Secure storage of secrets: Azure Key Vault employs the latest encryption algorithms to encrypt your secrets on rest. The encryption is done for you; you do not need any extra steps to enable it. Azure Key Vault encrypts your secrets on transit through HTTPS when you retrieve them.
- Access control and monitoring: Azure Key Vault allows you