Securing the Foundation of a Global Semiconductor Leader

How TeraSky deployed a resilient, platform-agnostic secrets engine across a semiconductor leader’s hybrid cloud.

 

A global leader in semiconductor manufacturing operates at a massive scale across private data centers and multiple public clouds. Managing the credentials, keys, and service identities that power hundreds of automation pipelines is a critical security discipline.

 

Their existing secrets tool lacked the flexibility needed for a truly hybrid footprint. Development teams, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments were becoming siloed, making centralized governance nearly impossible. The company needed a unified secrets platform that could serve every team under a single security model. They selected HashiCorp Vault Enterprise and partnered with TeraSky to design and deploy it.

 

The Challenge: The Risk of Fragmented Secrets

Technical Decisions & Architecture Outcomes

 

Instead of a standard rollout, TeraSky and the client engineered specific architectural solutions to address the complexities of a global, hybrid footprint:

 

Engineering Challenge	Architectural Decision	Operational Outcome
Eliminating Single Points of Failure	Deployed four Vault Enterprise clusters on Kubernetes across two geographic sites.	Achieved real-time Performance Replication globally with localized, zero-latency reads and automated Disaster Recovery failover.
Securing Runtime Pipelines	Integrated Vault directly with Jenkins and Terraform Enterprise using OIDC (Ping Identity).	Eliminated hardcoded credentials. Infrastructure pipelines now fetch dynamic, short-lived secrets at runtime.
Enforcing Cryptographic Sovereignty	Migrated the core Vault auto-unseal mechanism from cloud-hosted keys to on-premises Thales Luna HSM pairs.	Removed external cloud dependencies, ensuring the master cryptographic boundary lives entirely within the company infrastructure.
Automating Legacy Discovery	Deployed a custom credential resolver plugin across ~30 ServiceNow MID servers.	Replaced legacy credential management, enabling automated IT discovery workflows to securely pull Linux, AD, and Azure secrets on demand.

 

 

Moreover, what began as a localized Proof of Concept (POC) eventually evolved into a foundational security layer. Because the architecture was built to be platform-agnostic, the company is scaling the platform to meet next-generation security challenges without re-architecting the core engine. Current initiatives include certificate lifecycle automation for post-quantum cryptography readiness and identity governance for agentic AI workloads.

 

Tech Stack

• Core Infrastructure: HashiCorp Vault Enterprise, Kubernetes
• Identity & Automation: Ping Identity (OIDC), Terraform Enterprise, Jenkins, ServiceNow MID Servers
• Hardware Security & KMS: Thales Luna HSM, Azure Key Vault, AWS KMS (BYOK), KMIP

 

The Impact

 

By partnering with TeraSky, the client successfully transitioned from a fragmented, platform-specific credentials approach to a single, hardened governance model spanning their entire global footprint. Static credentials have been systematically eliminated from pipelines, configuration files, and application code. Instead, secrets are now issued dynamically at runtime and expire automatically, drastically reducing the organization’s blast radius and removing the risk of long-lived credential leaks.

 

This architecture has shifted Vault from a simple storage utility into the active security runtime for the entire enterprise—powering everything from core database connections and CI/CD pipelines to automated ServiceNow discovery workflows. By centralizing these touchpoints, the security team now gains complete, cross-platform visibility, capturing every credential access event in a single audit trail that is forwarded directly to their corporate SIEM. Ultimately, the migration to on-premises HSMs delivered true operational sovereignty, ensuring the company retains absolute control over its cryptographic boundary without relying on cloud providers’ keys.

 

“Vault has become a high-value platform across the organization. The TeraSky team guided us from initial evaluation through full production deployment, and they continue to help us build on that foundation as our security requirements evolve.”
— Security Engineering Leadership, Semiconductor Enterprise Client