As a site reliability engineer in a global company, I'm running a modern (well, relatively modern, to be honest and modest) cloud-native stack: HashiCorp Vault as the secret manager, workloads on Kubernetes clusters in AWS (EKS), and development workflows automated through Jenkins (legacy) and GitLab CI. This setup is, quite likely, familiar to you — it's the normal playbook in the cloud-native era.
In theory, we have the right tools for both security and efficiency: After all, we have a state-of-the-art secret manager integrated with everything. But in reality, it's far from the truth. See if you resonate with the following scenarios:
Scenario A: A new colleague just joined the team.
Manager: "Your initial password to log in to your corporate account came to me via email, but since you can't log in to your mail account just yet, here, take a picture of my screen." (In some companies, taking a picture of a computer monitor would get you fired, I'm not kidding.)
Scenario B: A developer needs a temp password to access a database.
