Case Study: Swiss Federal Railways strengthens secrets management and security with HashiCorp Vault

Modern Secrets Management for a Modern Railway Operator

Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) is one of the world’s most punctual railway operators, but its digital transformation required secure, scalable secrets management across a complex, always-on rail environment. SBB needed a developer-first solution to manage certificates, tokens, and credentials safely while eliminating hard-coded and plain-text secrets and supporting high availability and a fast-moving digitization roadmap. HashiCorp Vault was chosen to meet those requirements.

HashiCorp implemented Vault for SBB in a container-first, multi-cloud setup, with automated, code-driven operations and integrations into SBB’s existing platform and developer self-service processes. The result was stronger security, greater IT agility, reduced business risk, and security automation for critical systems. SBB also completed a full cloud-platform migration in just a few hours and brought the Vault platforms from zero to production in under six months, establishing a “lighthouse” use case for future transformation.

Swiss Federal Railways

Andreas Meister

Engineering Team Leader and Security Architect