What is Secrets Management?
Secrets management is the discipline of securely storing, distributing, rotating, and auditing sensitive credentials — such as API keys, passwords, tokens, certificates, and encryption keys — across applications, infrastructure, and teams.
As organizations grow, the number of secrets they manage explodes. Each application has database credentials, API keys, service account tokens, and certificates. Infrastructure requires SSH keys, cloud provider credentials, and TLS certificates. Teams need to share and rotate these secrets regularly without introducing vulnerabilities.
Dedicated secrets management platforms like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and Azure Key Vault provide centralized, audited, policy-driven access to secrets. They offer features like dynamic credential generation, automatic rotation, fine-grained access control, and audit logging. These tools are essential for large organizations with complex infrastructure.
However, secrets management platforms address the "machines accessing secrets" problem better than the "humans sharing secrets with humans" problem. When a developer needs to send an API key to a contractor, or an IT admin needs to deliver a temporary password to a new hire, the formal secrets manager is often too cumbersome for the task. This gap leads people to fall back on Slack, email, or sticky notes — exactly the insecure channels that secrets management is meant to replace.
How Vaulted uses Secrets Management
Vaulted complements enterprise secrets management tools by handling the human-to-human sharing gap. When you need to transmit a credential to another person — not programmatically from a vault to an application, but from one human to another — Vaulted provides an encrypted, self-destructing delivery mechanism. It requires no accounts, no integrations, and no setup, making it practical for the ad-hoc sharing scenarios where formal secrets managers add too much friction.