AccuRanker
Founded: 2013
Industry: Computer software
Employees: 22
Location: Aarhus, Denmark
AccuRanker is a software services company that develops search engine optimisation (SEO) tools used by SEO and marketing professionals in enterprises. The company’s flagship tool, also called AccuRanker, is a large-scale rank-tracking platform that delivers deep data insights for industry leaders. More than 32,000 customers use AccuRanker to seamlessly monitor their SEO performance across countless keywords and markets. Headquartered in Denmark, with offices in the US and UK, AccuRanker is a rapidly growing start-up building a foundation of security for future growth.
Situation
Like other software companies, AccuRanker manages developer secrets to support the development of its products. ‘Secrets’ refer to digital authentication credentials for sensitive parts of the IT and developer ecosystem; examples of secrets include database passwords, SSL/TLS certificates, API keys and private encryption keys.
A fast-paced start-up, AccuRanker found it was increasingly defaulting to suboptimal security practices, such as storing secrets across multiple cloud environments. The company’s other strategy for managing secrets was to store them in .env files. While a common approach among developers, .env files are an insecure method of secrets management. This approach also makes it more challenging for development teams to manage secrets and keep them up to date across the organisation.
Chief Technical Officer Henrik Refslund said, “Early on, we didn’t have a strategy for how we wanted to handle secrets management. When you have a new secret, what do you do with it? We found we were just doing what was most convenient, not what was most secure. We found ourselves in a position of hoping there was no leak.”
At one point, AccuRanker considered adopting the secrets management solution HashiCorp to help strengthen its security. While the team were impressed with the product’s capabilities, they realised some of the features were unnecessary for their needs and that the overall price was too high.
"Early on, we didn’t have a strategy for how we would like to handle secrets management. When you have a new secret, what do you do with that? We found we were just doing what was most convenient, not the most secure."
Solution: Easy-to-implement Bitwarden Secrets Manager
“We’ve been using Bitwarden Password Manager for a long time and really like the product,” said Refslund. “As we grew more familiar with Bitwarden, we discovered the company also offered a secrets management solution.”
After considering alternatives, AccuRanker chose the Bitwarden Secrets Manager. The team were drawn to the product’s lightweight implementation, ease of use and the fact that they were already familiar with and pleased with Bitwarden Password Manager. Refslund said, “Bitwarden was our best choice.”
“We’re at the stage where we have a proper secrets management strategy that we’re implementing across the organisation,” added Refslund. “We’re moving towards making all our systems secure and no longer making mistakes such as accidentally committing our secrets to code. Essentially, we’re securing our future as we continue to grow as a start-up.”
Supporting custom operations
Bitwarden Secrets Manager customers have the option of using the product’s command-line interface (CLI), a powerful tool for retrieving and injecting secrets. The Secrets Manager CLI can be used to organise customer vaults with create, delete, edit and list commands for customer secrets and projects. The AccuRanker team made the most of this functionality, creating a custom-built CLI wrapper to integrate with its back-end system. According to back-end engineer Phillip Kampmann, “We’re now able to access secrets such as encryption keys through our own internal API. In future, the CLI wrapper will also allow keys to be rotated automatically.”
More users, more advanced functions
Now that AccuRanker has, in Refslund’s words, a “super, super simple [secrets management] blueprint that every single developer can follow”, the team is looking to the future. AccuRanker plans to implement more advanced functions such as secret rotation via the custom-built CLI wrapper. It’s also set to bring more users on board and, of course, secure more secrets.
"With Bitwarden Secrets Manager, we have a super, super simple blueprint that every single developer can follow."
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