Case Study: UK Department for Work and Pensions secures secrets and speeds deployments with HashiCorp Vault

Protecting the Team and the Product With Vault at the UK DWP

The UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which serves over 20 million people and pays benefits at massive scale, needed a better way to manage sensitive secrets and releases as its digital teams grew. Previously, secrets were handled manually and shared through a small central DevOps group, creating operational risk, weak access partitioning, and a slow release process. DWP turned to HashiCorp Vault to help secure secrets and support a more secure, scalable product lifecycle.

HashiCorp implemented Vault with Terraform on AWS using multi-AZ, blue-green deployment, LDAP and IAM-based access controls, and layered permissions so product teams own their own secrets and configuration. DWP also standardized application deployment with Consul templates, immutable container images, automated PKI, and zero-downtime ECS rolling updates. The results included stronger security and ownership, reduced load on central DevOps, and deployments that became more than 50x faster, dropping from days to a few hours, with a goal of reaching 30 minutes or less.

Department for Works and Pensions

Chris Storey

Tech Lead