Case Study: Apptio securely manages hundreds of databases with HashiCorp Vault

Apptio Uses Hashicorp Vault, Puppet, GPG And LDAP To Securely Manage Access To Hundreds Of Databases Across 15 Data Centers Around The World

Apptio, a large-scale infrastructure team running about 6,000 VMs across 15 global data centers, needed a secure way to manage human access to hundreds of MySQL databases. The company wanted to eliminate shared passwords, improve auditing, and make credential rotation and revocation easier while keeping operations simple enough that engineers would actually use the system.

Using HashiCorp Vault, Apptio deployed a distributed privileged access management setup integrated with Consul, Puppet, GPG, LDAP, and custom tooling for unsealing and database access. HashiCorp helped Apptio automate Vault deployment and initialization, provide auditable on-demand database credentials, and streamline access for operators; the team reported being able to unseal roughly 75 Vaults in about 15 seconds and significantly reducing the need for helpdesk intervention.

Apptio

Lee Briggs

Senior Infrastructure Engineer