Three Sites. One Secrets Management Standard.

How TeraSky helped a major chipmaker deploy IBM HashiCorp Vault Enterprise across isolated production environments

The Decision

A global semiconductor manufacturer faced a growing security challenge common to large, complex enterprise environments: secrets were being managed in too many places, in too many ways.

FTP passwords were embedded in batch files. Database connection strings were stored in source control. SSL/TLS certificates require manual handling. Many of these credentials were static, long-lived, difficult to rotate, and hard to audit.

For a global manufacturer in a high-security industry, these static, hard-to-audit secrets had become a significant risk.

But the firm could not simply solve the problem by standing up one shared secrets platform. Each manufacturing site required its own isolated deployment model, with local availability and operations, and no dependency on other sites.

The company needed a way to eliminate hardcoded secrets and standardize secrets management across the organization, without compromising the separation between production environments.

The Technical Challenge

The core requirement was to design a secrets management model that could be consistent across the organization while remaining fully independent at each site.

That meant the architecture needed to answer several questions clearly:

• Could each site operate independently?
• Could secrets management be standardized without creating a shared cross-site dependency?
• Could both legacy and cloud-native applications consume secrets securely?
• Could the environment support high availability, automated recovery, centralized identity, and auditable configuration from day one?

TeraSky designed the IBM HashiCorp Vault Enterprise deployment around that balance: local isolation at each site, with a consistent enterprise secrets management standard across all three environments.

The Architecture

TeraSky built the architecture around three standalone Vault clusters, each deployed independently within its own production environment.

Each site received a dedicated 3-node Vault Enterprise cluster for local high availability, with load-balanced access across the cluster nodes. AWS KMS auto-unseal was used to eliminate manual unseal procedures and support automated recovery. Azure Active Directory OIDC integration connected Vault access to the client’s existing identity provider, while AppRole authentication supported application and Terraform-based workloads.

To make the configuration repeatable and auditable, TeraSky used Terraform to configure the KV secrets engine and establish a consistent operating model across all three sites. Each environment also included a dedicated admin VM for operational management.

In the end, instead of one centralized Vault deployment, the client received a standardized multi-site Vault architecture, with each site maintaining its own availability, identity integration, operational control, and failure boundary.

Key Technical Decisions

Application Integration

TeraSky also worked directly with the client’s teams to prove how the new Vault platform would be used by real applications.

At the primary manufacturing site, a VM-based Python application was updated to dynamically retrieve credentials from Vault via API calls. This removed hardcoded credentials from the application and gave the engineering team a working reference for traditional application integration.

In the secondary regional environment, Kubernetes workloads were integrated with Vault Secrets Operator. Instead of maintaining plaintext Kubernetes Secrets, workloads could consume secrets dynamically from Vault using a cloud-native pattern designed for Kubernetes environments.

Together, these two integrations provided the company with practical examples for both application models already present in the organization: traditional VM-based and Kubernetes-based workloads.

The Platform

TeraSky delivered the full multi-site IBM HashiCorp Vault Enterprise environment as a single professional services engagement.

The scope included architecture, implementation, infrastructure configuration, application integration, acceptance testing, and knowledge transfer across all three environments. Each site was deployed and validated independently, while following the same security and operational model.

The project delivered a working platform and provided the client’s teams with a repeatable foundation for onboarding additional applications, expanding secrets lifecycle management, and extending Vault usage into future initiatives such as PKI, certificate lifecycle management, and encryption key management.

Technology Stack

IBM HashiCorp Vault Enterprise • AWS KMS • Azure Active Directory (OIDC) • Terraform • IBM HashiCorp Vault Secrets Operator • Kubernetes • AppRole Authentication • KV v2 Secrets Engine • VM-based 3-node HA deployment per site

The Impact

With IBM HashiCorp Vault Enterprise operational across all three environments, the company moved from scattered, hardcoded credential storage to a standardized, policy-driven secrets management model across isolated production sites.

Hardcoded credentials were removed from production applications and scripts. Kubernetes workloads began consuming secrets dynamically instead of relying on plaintext Kubernetes Secret objects. Secret access became auditable, and teams gained a consistent model for managing, rotating, and revoking credentials across environments.

Just as importantly, the project established a secure foundation that the organization can build on. With isolated Vault clusters now in place at each site, the client has a practical path to extend secrets management into broader certificate lifecycle, PKI, and encryption key management use cases.

“TeraSky delivered exactly what we needed: a production-ready, multi-site secrets management platform that helped us resolve years of legacy security challenges in a very short timeframe,” shared a company representative. “Their partnership with IBM, expertise in Vault, and understanding of our environment made the entire process much smoother.”