Kong Enterprise has introduced a new plugin for HashiCorp Vault, enabling customers to enhance authentication and secrets management by securely storing credential tokens within Vault. This integration allows users to add authentication to services or routes using access and secret tokens, with the lifecycle of these credentials managed via either the Kong Admin API or directly through Vault. The setup involves creating a Vault object to facilitate communication between Kong and a Vault server, associating credentials with a Consumer, and managing token pairs as vault-auth credentials. The plugin supports seamless integration with Vault by treating Vault objects as references in plugin configurations, allowing for flexible deployment and management. The integration is designed to work with the Vault v1 KV engine and supports the creation and management of token pairs either through the Kong Admin API or directly in Vault, offering Kong Enterprise users enhanced security and automation capabilities.