Case Study: Vodafone UK achieves high-speed encrypted data management with HashiCorp Vault

Vodafone uses HashiCorp Vault and have developed custom plugin capability to power secrets management and their highspeed encryption engine

Vodafone UK, a global telecommunications provider, needed a way to securely anonymize and encrypt personally identifiable information at massive scale for analytics, AI, and dashboarding workloads in Google Cloud. Using HashiCorp Vault, the team looked to move beyond standard secrets management and support high-volume, low-latency AEAD encryption while maintaining strict separation of encryption, decryption, and administration roles.

HashiCorp helped Vodafone UK extend Vault with a custom plugin built around Google Tink, turning Vault into a server-side encryption engine that keeps keys securely stored while encrypting and decrypting data on demand. The solution supported key lifecycle management and BigQuery synchronization, and in testing Vodafone achieved up to 10 million encryptions per second, or 36 billion per hour, enabling secure processing of a 17-petabyte data lake at scale.

Vodafone UK

Andy Shacklady

Cloud Technology Platform Engineering Manager