Vaults

A vault is a container for related secrets. Vaults are how Keyvault keeps things organized and how access is granted: you share a vault, and everyone in it sees the items it holds. Getting your vault structure right early makes everything else — sharing, search, and audit — simpler.

Personal vs shared vaults

Every account has two kinds of vault.

Type	Who can see it	Good for
Personal vault	Only you	Your own logins, personal API keys, private notes
Shared vault	People your team grants access to	Team credentials, service tokens, on-call access

Your personal vault is created automatically and cannot be shared. Shared vaults are created by your team and can hold anywhere from a couple of items to hundreds.

Creating a vault

If your role allows it, you can create shared vaults for your team:

1. Select + New vault at the bottom of the vault list.
2. Give it a clear, specific name such as Engineering or Payments – Prod.
3. Optionally add a short description so teammates know what belongs in it.
4. Select Create. The vault is empty and ready for items.

Once created, invite people or groups to it — see Sharing & permissions. Whether you can create vaults depends on your role; see Teams & org.

Organizing your vaults

Vaults themselves stay flat, but you have several tools to keep a busy vault tidy:

• Tags — label items like prod, ci, or on-call and filter by them within a vault. See Items & fields.
• Naming conventions — a consistent prefix such as AWS — Production or GitHub — Org PAT makes items easy to scan and search.
• Favorites — star the items you reach for most so they surface at the top.

Sorting and viewing

Inside a vault you can sort by name, most recently used, or last modified. Use the search box at the top to filter across every vault you can see at once — Keyvault matches on item name, tags, and associated websites.

Moving items between vaults

As teams grow, secrets sometimes belong somewhere else — a personal login becomes a shared team credential, or an item is filed in the wrong vault. To move it:

1. Open the item, or select several items with the multi-select checkboxes.
2. Choose Move to vault from the item menu.
3. Pick the destination vault and confirm.

When you move an item into a shared vault, everyone with access to that vault can then see it according to their permission level. When you move it out, people who only had access through the old vault lose access.

Archiving and deleting vaults

When a project ends, you can archive its vault to remove it from everyone's active list while keeping its contents recoverable, or delete it permanently if your role allows. Deleting a vault removes its items for everyone, so export or move anything worth keeping first — see Backup & recovery.

Next steps

• Items & fields — add and structure the secrets inside a vault.
• Sharing & permissions — decide who gets into each vault and at what level.