How to Protect Your Cloud Data with AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager that can manage, retrieve, and rotate the passwords, database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. It provides the central credential management with security at its best, resulting in the avoidance of hard coding of credentials in the code.

AWS Secrets Manager Features and Benefits

AWS Secrets Manager offers many features and benefits, including

Rotating secrets is security compliance for most organizations, although not all of them actually do this. While some organizations do write custom automation scripts to rotate secrets at frequent time intervals, this requires specifying the latest secrets in the application configurations and may necessitate application deployments. AWS Secrets Manager assures that your application will get the latest rotated secrets since an API call will always return the latest versions.

AWS Secrets Manager integrates seamlessly with other AWS services. This means that from now on, you don’t have to store database credentials and manage them using third-party applications. Rather, these credentials are just an API call away from the application. In addition, secrets are not limited to the databases running in AWS—you can also store and manage API keys, OAuth tokens, and more.

Using AWS Secrets Manager is simple. Just make an API call and it will retrieve the credentials for you. It also automatically manages the credentials of resources running in AWS, rotates secrets after a predefined interval of time, and allows you to control access to your secrets. You can also use IAM policies to provide the required access to relevant users.

With AWS Secrets Manager, you can manage access to secrets using fine-grained policies. For example, an IAM policy will allow developers to retrieve credentials for the development environment. The same policy may have a different rule that allows the same set of users to retrieve credentials for other environments, but only if accessed from a certain set of IPs. Using AWS Secrets Manager, you can also manage SSH keys and provide fine-grained access to relevant users.

AWS Secrets Manager is fully integrated with AWS CloudTrail service for logging and audit purposes. E.g., AWS CloudTrail will show the API calls related to creating the secret, retrieving the secret, deleting the secret, etc.

*Secrets Manager avoids the need for hard-coding the credentials or sensitive information in your application code. It serves the purpose of having an API call to the secrets manager to retrieve the secret programmatically. Having this mechanism in place restricts anyone from compromising sensitive information or credentials as secret information doesn’t exist in the plaintext in the code.

*Secrets Manager provides centralized credential management, which reduces the operational burden resulting in the active rotation of credentials at regular intervals to improve the security posture of the organization.