Case Study: Hybrid Cloud Secrets Management for a Telecommunications Provider

Client & Context

A leading telecommunications provider approached us to help modernize their hybrid infrastructure. The company operated a complex environment combining both on-premise data centers and multiple public cloud providers. As they scaled their services and embraced cloud-native architectures, managing secrets across such a diverse ecosystem became a growing challenge.

Their engineering teams struggled with maintaining consistency between on-prem systems and cloud services. Each environment handled credentials differently, which made cross-environment communication unreliable and slowed down delivery pipelines. At the same time, strict uptime requirements demanded a robust disaster recovery strategy that could span all environments without increasing operational burden.

Objectives

The client's key goals were to:

• Centralize secrets management across on-prem and cloud infrastructure

• Simplify CI/CD pipelines and ensure consistent access control

• Improve disaster recovery capabilities and cross-environment reliability

• Enable modernization of legacy applications without requiring major code changes

Challenges

The organization's existing approach to credential management was fragmented. Database credentials were hardcoded or stored in multiple configuration systems, each maintained separately by different teams. This made rotation, auditing, and access control complicated and time-consuming.

Legacy applications still hosted on-premise could not easily integrate with modern authentication systems, leading to manual credential handling and inconsistent security practices. Moreover, the lack of a unified secrets platform meant the client had limited visibility into how credentials were used across their multi-cloud environment.

The team also faced challenges in maintaining consistent CI/CD processes across environments. Deployment pipelines for cloud and on-prem systems followed different workflows, introducing unnecessary complexity and operational risk.

Our Approach

We implemented HashiCorp Vault as the central backbone for secrets management across the client's hybrid infrastructure. Vault served as a secure and consistent bridge between their on-prem systems and cloud environments, ensuring all credentials were managed, rotated, and audited in a unified way.

We began by designing a multi-environment Vault deployment with high availability and disaster recovery in mind. The setup included replication across data centers and clouds, allowing for business continuity even in the event of regional outages.

Vault was integrated directly with the client's existing CI/CD pipelines. This allowed build and deployment systems to automatically fetch dynamic credentials, eliminating the need to store secrets within pipelines. Developers could now deploy services confidently across environments without managing sensitive data manually.

For legacy applications, we introduced a secrets injection pattern that allowed them to consume credentials from Vault without modifying their code. This enabled modernization of security practices without rewriting existing systems.

By standardizing credential management with Vault, we also helped the client achieve cross-environment consistency. The same authentication mechanisms and access policies now applied across all cloud providers and on-prem infrastructure.

Terraform was used to codify Vault configuration, making policies and integrations version-controlled and auditable. Combined with audit logging, this provided full visibility into credential usage across every system.

Outcomes

The new centralized secrets management system unified the client's hybrid infrastructure and eliminated inconsistencies between cloud and on-prem environments.

CI/CD pipelines became simpler and more secure, as secrets were dynamically injected during builds and deployments. Legacy applications benefited from improved security without requiring code changes.

The client also achieved enhanced disaster recovery capabilities, with Vault's replication ensuring that secrets remained available even during infrastructure disruptions. Cross-environment database credential management was now automated, reducing manual intervention and operational overhead.

Overall, the project strengthened the client's security posture, improved engineering efficiency, and established a foundation for continued modernization.

Key Lessons Learned

Hybrid environments benefit most from centralized, cloud-agnostic secrets management. Modernization doesn't always require rewriting legacy systems integrations can extend secure practices to existing applications. Unified secrets systems simplify CI/CD pipelines and enable consistent operations across environments.

Conclusion

By leveraging HashiCorp Vault, we helped the telecommunications provider unify their hybrid infrastructure into a secure, consistent, and resilient ecosystem. The result was improved reliability, automated credential management, and simplified multi-environment operations all without disrupting critical legacy systems or delivery pipelines.