Automatic credential rotation

Credential rotation shouldn't feel like a fire drill. In this episode of the Five minutes to zero standing access video series, see how P0 automates the entire credential lifecycle—coordinating rotation, notification, and safe handoff.

Watch a real example with GCP service accounts, Secret Manager, and Jira integration to see how P0 ensures secrets stay fresh without disrupting production.

Most security teams agree: credentials should be rotated frequently. But ask how often it actually happens - across service accounts, automation keys, and cloud access tokens - and you’ll hear a different story.

Rotations get postponed. Owners are hard to track down. Tickets pile up. Vaults go out of sync. And somewhere along the line, a service fails silently because an old credential was disabled before a dependent system was updated.

This isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a coordination problem.

And it’s exactly the kind of problem P0 was built to solve.

Why credential rotation is so painful

Credential rotation sounds simple: replace a key, update dependencies, revoke the old one.

But in reality, most workflows break down because the responsibility is fragmented. No one owns the full lifecycle. Secrets get rotated without warning. Vaults and ticketing systems don’t talk to each other. And when there’s a failure, the root cause is often buried inside a forgotten Jira ticket or a disabled key that still powered a production dependency.

That’s why most teams silently defer rotation - or worse, rotate credentials manually and hope for the best.

How it works

In this how-to video, we show how P0 automates the full lifecycle of credential rotation - without skipping critical coordination steps.

The demo covers how to:

• Configure a credential for rotation with the right cadence, vault, and assignee
• Use Google Secret Manager to securely store newly generated secrets
• Auto-create Jira tickets to notify owners and track key handoffs
• Rotate credentials on a set schedule and confirm that rotation is complete
• Disable and delete old credentials only after safe handoff

In the video, we follow a rotation from start to finish:

• A GCP service account key is flagged for rotation
• P0 creates a new key and adds it to version 39 of the Secret Manager secret
• A Jira ticket is generated and assigned to the owner
• After completing the ticket, the user marks it done, triggering P0 to disable the old key (68D)
• The cloud console confirms that the key has been disabled
• The next rotation is already scheduled - no extra setup required

<<INSERT SCREENSHOT TO VIDEO HERE: and link to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>>

Let’s say you want to rotate a GCP service account key every 90 days. With P0, you don’t need to script this out manually or rely on someone remembering to trigger a job. You simply define three things: the vault where the secret lives, how often to rotate it, and who’s responsible for updating anything that depends on it.

From there, P0 handles the rest:

• Thirty days before the scheduled rotation, P0 generates a new key and stores it as a new version in your vault (e.g., version 39 in Secret Manager).
• It automatically opens a Jira ticket assigned to the appropriate owner, with context and instructions.
• That owner updates any downstream systems using the old key, then marks the ticket complete.
• Once the ticket is resolved, P0 disables the old credential and schedules it for deletion after a 7-day grace period.

No manual cleanup. No guesswork. No risk of premature breakage.

Why this matters

The magic isn’t just in automating the vault action - it’s in coordinating the entire lifecycle across teams and tools.

P0 treats credential rotation as a governance workflow, not a one-off automation job.

You get:

• Real-time coordination between P0, your vault (like Secret Manager), and your ticketing system (like Jira)
• Human-in-the-loop control: automation when possible, ownership when needed
• Visibility into what’s overdue, what’s upcoming, and what’s already resolved
• Assurance that nothing gets deleted until you know it’s safe to do so

Rotating credentials shouldn’t be a fire drill or a manual checklist.

With P0, it becomes a structured, repeatable flow:

• Secrets get rotated on time
• Tickets get routed to the right owners
• Old credentials are cleaned up safely
• And no one has to worry about who forgot to do what

Credential rotation moves from “eventually” to automatic. From risky to reliable.

See for yourself

If rotating credentials still feels like a gamble - or worse, an afterthought - this walkthrough shows how to fix it for good.