Case Study: McKinsey & Company accelerates secure cloud transformation with HashiCorp Vault, Terraform, and Consul

Secret Management in an Immutable World at Digital McKinsey

McKinsey & Company’s Digital McKinsey team, a large and fast-growing transformation practice within the 90-year-old consulting firm, needed a secure way to move toward public cloud and agile delivery without compromising client confidence, governance, or security. Working with HashiCorp products such as Terraform, Consul, and especially Vault, the team faced challenges around immutable infrastructure, secrets, encryption key management, and cloud identity in a highly regulated environment.

HashiCorp helped McKinsey build a cloud-native, two-speed IT approach with immutable infrastructure and centralized secret management. Vault was used for secrets, SSH certificate-based access, policy-driven permissions, audit logging to a SIEM, encryption and key management, STS credential issuance, and TOTP-based root MFA; Consul Template streamlined configuration. The result was a more secure, developer-friendly platform that reduced long-term credentials, improved auditing and access control, and accelerated McKinsey’s cloud transformation at scale.

McKinsey & Company

Steve Jansen

McKinsey & Company