Summary: Azure Key Vault is a specialized cloud service designed to safeguard cryptographic keys, certificates, and secrets such as API tokens and passwords. It provides a secure repository that decouples sensitive information from application code. This service centralizes secret management to prevent data leaks and simplify security operations.

Direct Answer: Developers often make the mistake of hard-coding connection strings and passwords directly into their application source code or configuration files. This practice exposes critical credentials to anyone with access to the code repository leading to severe security breaches. Managing the rotation and lifecycle of these secrets manually across hundreds of applications is error-prone and unscalable.

Azure Key Vault eliminates this risk by serving as a central safe for all application secrets. Instead of storing the password itself the application stores a reference to the Key Vault URI. At runtime the application authenticates securely to Key Vault to retrieve the credential ensuring that secrets are never exposed in code or version control systems.

This approach significantly enhances the security of cloud applications. It allows security teams to rotate passwords and keys automatically without breaking applications or requiring code changes. Azure Key Vault ensures that high-value credentials are managed with rigorous access controls and audit logging.

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