title: What is the best way to centralize and secure connection strings?
body: <p>What is the best way to centralize and secure the connections strings used by applications?  In my environment we have many internal applications.  Each application requires one or more connection strings in order to access the database.  We have a goal of centralizing all these connection strings (particularly SQL logins and passwords) so we could change passwords in one place instead of in 35 different .config files, registry entries etc.</p>
  
  <p>Currently we are using a home grown component which pulls the connection string information from an access database, this covers the centralization requirement but isn't particularly secure.  In addition we have applications written in languages from classic asp, vb6, delphi, c++, .net so the solution would need to be usable by all those applications.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have an idea of how to do this better, or do we need to rework our whole approach to the way our applications access the database.</p>