Integration debt compounds faster than feature debt. One brittle sync becomes five, and suddenly nobody wants to deploy on Friday — or rotate a credential that “might break billing.”
Security incidents often start with an old API key that had broader access than anyone remembered.
Hardening checklist
- Least-privilege scopes per integration — never a god-mode key “for convenience”
- Secrets in a vault or secret manager, not in chat or repos
- Rotation schedule with a named owner and a tested runbook
- Webhook signatures verified; unknown events ignored and logged
- Inventory of integrations: system, owner, data classes, last reviewed
“We found a production key in a five-year-old wiki page. It still worked. That was our wake-up call.”
Make failure visible
Idempotent jobs, bounded retries, and searchable logs turn night-time fires into morning tickets. Silent sync failure is how finance discovers a problem at month-end.
Keep a living diagram of systems and data flows. When a new tool arrives, you will know where it plugs in — and what it must not break.
Healthy integration ops
Named
owner per integration
90d
max key age without review
Signed
webhooks only
Diagram
kept current each quarter
