Case Study: Swiss Federal Railways achieves self-service secrets management with HashiCorp Vault

Secrets Management at Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) with HashiCorp Vault

Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) needed a secure, scalable way to manage secrets across a complex, highly available, multi-cloud environment supporting critical rail operations. After evaluating the market, SBB chose HashiCorp Vault Enterprise to address its secrets management challenges and to support a developer-first approach with stronger governance and reliability.

HashiCorp helped SBB build a self-service Vault platform integrated with AWS, Swiss Cloud, OpenShift, Azure AD, Terraform, Argo CD, Splunk, and Prometheus, with governance handled through a self-service portal. The team went from zero to production in under six months, launched primary and DR Vault clusters for prod and non-prod, and established a foundation for onboarding additional use cases such as Kubernetes/OpenShift integration, database secrets, and certificate management.

Swiss Federal Railways

Andreas Meister

Engineering Team Leader and Security Architect