Peak retail season puts enormous pressure on infrastructure. Teams spend months preparing by load testing servers, optimizing checkout flows, and scaling cloud resources. But the authentication systems that connect everything often don’t get the same scrutiny.
These “secrets” (database passwords, API tokens, certificates) authenticate every transaction and integration behind your storefront. When mismanaged, payment processing stalls, order systems go offline, and deployments get blocked. Exposed credentials also create security vulnerabilities that attackers exploit.
Retailers regularly experience outages during their busiest weeks due to expired credentials or manual provisioning bottlenecks. Even one expired certificate can cause major disruption, as a 2024 cloud platform outage showed. Because these systems are interconnected, one failed credential can cascade across multiple services.
Here are four common mistakes that create risk during peak season, and practical steps to address them.
Mistake #1: Hardcoded Credentials in Code and Configuration Files
When developers are racing to ship features, embedding credentials directly into scripts or configuration files is fast and easy. But these secrets rarely get removed, sitting in codebases and spreading across environments.
During peak season prep, teams push updates rapidly, increasing the chances of exposing credentials. Automated scanners continually crawl public repositories – GitGuardian identified nearly 24 million leaked secrets on GitHub in a single year. Once leaked, attackers can access databases, payment systems, or customer data.
What to do instead: Credentials need to be stored separately from code. The real challenge is changing developer workflows and making secure practices as easy as the insecure shortcuts. This means having clear policies, simplifying secret retrieval, and implementing automated checks that catch hardcoded secrets before they reach production.
Mistake #2: Manual or Nonexistent Credential Rotation
Many retailers handle credential rotation through outdated scripts or skip it entirely, meaning credentials often live for months or years. Manual rotation is error-prone, and during peak season, rotation gets postponed. An expired credential can bring down order processing at the worst possible time, or rotation happens but one system doesn’t get updated, causing preventable outages.
What to do instead: Make rotation automatic and invisible to operations through tooling and coordination across teams. Start with your most critical systems and build processes that don’t rely on someone remembering to run a script. Industry frameworks such as OWASP and the UK NCSC recommend using short-lived (dynamic) credentials to reduce standing secrets altogether.
Mistake #3: No Unified Visibility Into Who Has Access to What
In most retail organizations, secrets management happens in silos with no central inventory or unified view of access. When contractors leave or employees change roles, access often isn’t revoked promptly. During audits, teams struggle to answer basic questions about credential distribution, and when incidents occur, there’s no clear audit trail.
What to do instead: This is as much an organizational problem as a technical one. Organizations need someone to own the credential inventory, with access policies documented and enforced consistently. Compliance updates such as PCI DSS 4.0 now expect demonstrable access controls and audit logs for all non-human identities, making central visibility non-optional for retailers handling payments. A good starting point is mapping out what credentials exist and who owns them, even if that begins with a spreadsheet.
Mistake #4: Slow Provisioning That Blocks Deployments
When a developer needs access to a database or API, the request often goes through a manual approval process that can take days. During peak season, these delays become critical bottlenecks as teams race to deploy features and get stuck waiting for credentials. The pressure leads to workarounds like sharing credentials or granting overly broad access.
What to do instead: Security teams need oversight while development teams need speed, and these goals can feel at odds. The answer isn’t to eliminate approval processes but to build them without manual intervention for routine requests. Define what “routine” means for your context, automate those cases, and reserve human review for genuinely risky access requests. Techniques such as just-in-time access and automated secret issuance help deliver credentials securely without creating long-lived exposure. Most importantly, the process shouldn’t incentivize workarounds.
Don’t Wait for Peak Season to Test Your Secrets Management
The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s will reveal whether your secrets management can handle real pressure. But you don’t want to find out during a traffic spike that your authentication systems are fragile.
Start by auditing your current state. Map out where credentials live, how they’re rotated, and who has access. Talk to the teams managing these systems daily.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s identifying your highest-risk areas and addressing them systematically – automating rotation for payment credentials or centralizing access for critical APIs. Small improvements in secrets hygiene can prevent cascading failures that turn a busy shopping day into a crisis.
Your customers never see your secrets management. But they definitely notice when it fails.
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Bio: Refael Angel is the Co-Founder and CTO of Akeyless, where he developed the company’s patented Zero-Trust encryption technology. A seasoned software engineer with deep expertise in cryptography and cloud security, Refael previously served as a Senior Software Engineer at Intuit’s R&D center in Israel, where he built systems for managing encryption keys in public cloud environments and designed machine authentication services. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Jerusalem College of Technology, which he earned at the age of 19.
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