Akeyless Secrets Management

The main use case is to manage our secrets, to secure machine credentials, API keys, certificates or tokens, and SSH credentials and encryption keys. All of these are secured in hybrid and multi-cloud environments through this tool.

Generally, I fit Akeyless Secrets Management into CI/CD pipelines. I have a lot of CI/CD pipelines and many cloud environments in AWS, Azure, and GCP. I manage all API keys and encryption keys through Akeyless Secrets Management. Akeyless Secrets Management offers multiple features including automated key rotation. There is a feature called Distributed Fragment Cryptography, which is a patented Zero-Knowledge encryption architecture provided by Akeyless Secrets Management. This is the main use case of Akeyless Secrets Management.

One thing I want to say about Akeyless Secrets Management is that many other secret management providers are available, but Akeyless Secrets Management helps us because it has a feature called automated secret rotation. This automated secret rotation automatically triggers a workflow to our hybrid cloud or cloud provider to rotate the secrets on a long-term basis, such as every three months or six months. This ensures the security of our organization better. This is a security best practice generally used in many organizations, but they implement it through their own scripts and CI/CD scripts. Now, with Akeyless Secrets Management, I do not have to do that. Akeyless Secrets Management provides this by default. It has helped us a lot because it reduces overhead for our organization.

The features mainly include that Akeyless Secrets Management supports multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It has a Universal Secrets Connector and can connect with other secret managers. It offers good compliance, automated secret rotation, temporary credentials, and dynamic secrets options. The main standout feature is the Zero-Knowledge architecture.

Automated secret rotation stands out most for me. This significantly lowers my manual effort. Without manual intervention, it is automated. Without manual overhead, it solves many issues.

I sometimes feel that there are documentation gaps in Akeyless Secrets Management. The documentation could be more detailed for advanced integrations and troubleshooting.

Some organizations feel that there is a trust concern because the secrets are stored in Akeyless Secrets Management and it is not open-sourced. It is completely closed-source. If something goes wrong or someone hacks Akeyless Secrets Management, there is a huge drawback. These are concerns my organization and many other organizations are facing.

The UI/UX could be better on the homepage and many other pages. Pricing transparency should also be improved. The pricing should include discounted pricing for regular customers or regular enterprise customers.

I have been using Akeyless Secrets Management for around one year.

Akeyless Secrets Management's scalability is very good. As of now, I have not experienced any issues.

The customer support is good, but it is somewhat slower compared to other support systems. It could be faster.

Before Akeyless Secrets Management, I used many other secret managers including in-built secret managers in AWS, AWS Vault, and HashiCorp Vault. Before that, I had to do it manually. With Akeyless Secrets Management, I was able to rotate it very quickly. The efficiency I can report is that around 40% to 50% of the efforts are not wasted in secret management.

Previously, I was using HashiCorp Vault and AWS Secret Manager. There were many issues with HashiCorp Vault and AWS Secret Manager, such as the lack of automated secret rotation and many compliance threats attached to those platforms. This is why I switched to Akeyless Secrets Management.

The metric is based on two or three factors including the time saved and the number of manual tasks reduced, as well as the before and after time. Based on those metrics, my organization's efficiency improvement is 40%.

HashiCorp Vault and AWS Secret Manager were the options I evaluated, but I did not get the results I was looking for. They do not have automated secret rotation, and they do not have a Zero-Knowledge architecture or this cryptographic design. Akeyless Secrets Management stands out because it combines SaaS simplicity with a Zero-Knowledge cryptographic design, reducing operational overhead without fully sacrificing control.

The advice I will give to anyone looking into using Akeyless Secrets Management is to first evaluate what tool you need according to your organization's needs. Understand your organization's need and determine why you need this tool and whether it is necessary. Ask these questions and then choose any tool, not only this tool, but these questions need to be asked beforehand. Once you ask yourself those questions, then you will be confident that you need to use this tool. Always evaluate alternative options as well.

Use Akeyless Secrets Management as a temporary tool, not a permanent tool. Store a backup of your secrets somewhere. You should not completely rely on Akeyless Secrets Management because if Akeyless Secrets Management fails, everything fails due to a single point of failure. If you have a good backup, you will always be better positioned. These are the suggestions I would give. I gave this product a rating of 8.5 out of 10.

My main use case for Akeyless Secrets Management is using the static and dynamic secrets functionality. Rather than using static keys within cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP, we use Akeyless Secrets Management to generate short-lived access credentials to then authenticate to cloud environments.

We also use Akeyless Secrets Management when integrating with third-party tools. When an integration needs to occur between one of our public clouds and a third-party vendor, you would sometimes have to put in a static key on the third-party tool's side. Rather than using a JSON key created directly on a cloud platform, we create it via Akeyless Secrets Management and then enable automatic rotation and upload that onto the third-party tool provider website. This applies to both code-based and UI-based use cases.

I appreciate that Akeyless Secrets Management offers the ability for secrets to be automatically rotated. When interacting with it via code, Akeyless Secrets Management automatically rotates secrets to increase security. Additionally, I understand that Akeyless Secrets Management does not store the entire secret in one string on their side. The secret is split across different servers, which is extremely secure.

The rotation of secrets aspect of Akeyless Secrets Management is excellent. It allows for much higher security and there is a great reduction in potential exploits or attacks to our infrastructure because it is very difficult to get compromised credentials when they rotate so regularly. Akeyless Secrets Management splitting secrets in terms of their storage also means that even if an attacker were to infiltrate Akeyless Secrets Management's infrastructure, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to get the full credentials. This security is excellent for us and also for our customers.

Using Akeyless Secrets Management has greatly increased our security posture, which is excellent and definitely reduces the risk of potential attacks or exploits. From a security-specific perspective, this is excellent when looking at things like data security. It has improved our data security posture. In terms of financial governance, if we were to be exploited in cloud environments, costs can very quickly ramp up. Using Akeyless Secrets Management actually saves potential costs as well.

I do not believe there are any improvements needed for Akeyless Secrets Management. It works excellently for what it aims to do. The UI on Akeyless Secrets Management is also very easy to use, which is important because engineers across a business would use this. It is not just one team that uses it; everyone would use it. Akeyless Secrets Management achieves its aims perfectly.

I have been using Akeyless Secrets Management for two years.

Akeyless Secrets Management was not purchased through the AWS Marketplace. It was purchased directly with the vendor, but it interacts with AWS because it links with the AWS cloud.

I would recommend others to use Akeyless Secrets Management. It is a brilliant security platform. It is very easy to use. It does exactly what it says it should. I would highly recommend people to use it.

I would say the risk reduction of the compromise of long-lived static credentials is over fifty percent, which is excellent because if every static credential is created through Akeyless Secrets Management, it greatly reduces the risk. Arguably it would be somewhere between fifty to ninety-nine percent.

I have given this product a rating of ten out of ten.