Azure Key Vault: Securing Secrets, Keys, and Certificates – Best Practices

Secure secret management is a foundational element of enterprise security. Azure Key Vault provides a centralized, highly secure platform for managing critical assets such as API keys, credentials, certificates, and encryption keys. This post presents security-focused best practices to help architects design and implement robust controls around Key Vault usage—ensuring compliance, reducing attack surfaces, and mitigating operational risks while backup is fundamental requirements hence I am not adding in the best practices.

Best practice 0: Ensure the selection of right SKU for HA and DR refer my blog for more details Azure Key Vault Disaster recovery(DR) – Arya blog

Best practice 1: Use Separate Vaults for Different Environments to maintain isolation and minimize blast radius:

• Create different vaults for Dev, Test, and Prod.
• Apply unique access controls per vault.
• Prevent accidental sharing or overwriting across environments

Best practice 2: Set Expiration Dates and Automate Secret Rotation Avoid stale or expired secrets

• Set expiration dates for all secrets, keys, and certificates.
• Automate rotation using Logic Apps or Azure Functions.
• Use Key Vault references in services like App Services to consume updated secrets without redeploying apps.

Best practice3: Enabled logging and monitoring access for visibility and compliance

• Send logs to Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, or Storage Accounts.
• Track who accessed what, when, and from where.
• Integrate with Azure Sentinel for security analytics and alerting.

Best practice 4: Restrict Network access

• Use Private Endpoints to lock down access to your VNet.
• Configure IP firewall rules for known, trusted sources only.
• Enable only necessary Trusted Microsoft Services access.

Best practice 5: Prefer Azure RBAC Over Access Policies for more granular and manageable permission please note contributor role has permission to create or delete the vault ensure that a custom contributor role is made which removes those permission, key vault and secrets and key rotation must be offloaded to central CISO team if possible

• Assign least-privilege roles such as Key Vault Secrets User.
• RBAC is integrated with Azure AD and supports audit logging.
• Use Access Policies only for backward compatibility or unsupported scenarios.

Best practice 6: Enable soft delete and purge protection to protect your keys from accidental or malicious deletion

Best practice 7: Ensure Key vaults are protected with locks cannot delete to ensure protection from accidental and malicious deletion of vault