# Azure Key Vault

## Overview

Azure Key Vault is a cloud service that provides a secure storage for secrets. You can use this Azure resource to securely store custom keys, passwords, certificates, and other secrets.
Azure Key Vault helps solve the following problems:

* **Secrets Management** - Azure Key Vault can be used to securely store and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets.
* **Key Management** - Azure Key Vault can be used as a Key Management solution that makes it easy to create and control the cryptographic keys used to encrypt your data.
* **Certificate Management** - Azure Key Vault lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer (TLS/SSL) certificates for use with Azure and your internal connected resources.

For more information, see Microsoft documentation » [Azure Key Vault](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/).

You can access Azure Key Vault directly through the Azure Portal, or by navigating to *Key Vault* » *Secrets & Certificates* on the *Welcome* page of Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.

> info  **NOTE**: Only users with *Access Repos and Pipelines* group permissions can manage secrets, keys, and certificates in a Key Vault.

## Use Key Vault secrets for application configurations

As an additional level of usability, you are allowed to link a Key Vault secret to a variable group. This way, you can use Key Vault secrets when configuring the values for custom *AppSettings* or *ConnectionStrings*. The custom *AppSettings* and *ConnectionStrings* will be applied during deployment of the application to the respective environments. If the Key Vault secret value changes, you have to re-deploy the application so that it starts using the new value.\
This approach applies to both Sitefinity CMS and ASP.NET Core / Next.js Renderer applications.

For more information on how to use Key Vault secrets for Sitefinity configurations, see [Manage the configurations](https://www.progress.com/documentation/sitefinity-cms/cloud/develop-and-deploy/manage-the-configurations).