The secret’s out — Google Cloud Secret Manager, that is. The cloud giant launched its Secrets Manager tool for Google Cloud service to help users securely store sensitive information like API keys, passwords, certificates, and other important data.

The platform serves as a home base for sensitive data where users can manage, access, and audit secrets across Google Cloud from a central location. The new tool further addresses security concerns as the rise of multicloud continues complicating identity and access controls.

“Many applications require credentials to connect to a database, API keys to invoke a service, or certificates for authentication,” Google developer advocate Seth Vargo and product manager Matt Driscoll wrote in a blog post announcing the new tool. “Managing and securing access to these secrets is often complicated by secret sprawl, poor visibility, or lack of integrations.”

The new service joins the ranks of fellow Google Cloud secret managers Berglas, which is an open source project for managing secrets on Google Cloud, and Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS), which is a cloud-hosted key management service that lets users manage cryptographic keys for cloud services the same way they do on-premises. Both Berglas and Cloud KMS can be used in conjunction with Secret Manager. Berglas will enable users to transport, create, and access secrets in Secret Manager. While Cloud KMS, which does not store secrets, it does encrypt them when stored in a different location. To this end, Secret Manager will provide a single point of access to manage secrets in Google Cloud.

All secrets come with a price and Secret Manager is no exception — even while its in beta with limited support. Users will be charged $0.03 per 10,000 operations and $0.06 per active secret version per regional replica per month.

Google Cloud's move follows similar offerings by rivals. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has its own Secrets Manager, while Microsoft has its Azure Secrets product.

Cloud security and the associated lack of control remains a concern across all industries. The increasingly distributed nature of IT systems is likely one major reason many companies are also increasing investment in the technology used to protect and secure them.

Moreover, improved identity and access control are only one part of the puzzle. New governance and security controls are also needed to ensure data protection in a multicloud environment. This was highlighted in the first Kubernetes security audit that was recently released by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and conducted by Trail of Bits and Atredis Partners. That internal look found a number of Kubernetes-wide issues, including policies that may not be applied and that can lead to a false sense of security; insecure transport layer security (TLS) being used by default; credentials being exposed in unsecure environments; names of secrets being leaked in logs; a lack of certificate revocation; and seccomp, which filters a process’s systems calls, not being enabled by default.