Ansible's agentless model reduces attack surface but shifts risk to the control node and SSH key management. These are the high-priority controls before running any playbooks in production. Vault provides symmetric AES-256-CTR encryption for secrets stored alongside playbooks. It is not a secrets manager—it is a way to safely commit encrypted data to version control. Use vault IDs to separate secrets by classification level or team, avoiding a single shared password. For production, prefer pulling secrets at runtime from a dedicated secrets manager rather than storing them vault-encrypted in the repo: Ansible'sbecomemechanism wrapssudo,su,pbrun, and others. Misuse is one of the most common security findings in Ansible audits. Thedevsec.hardeningcollection implements CIS Benchmark controls as idempotent roles for Linux and Windows. It is the de facto standard starting point. Ansible can bothremediateandauditcompliance states. Red Hat'srhel-system-rolesand community roles from OpenSCAP cover the major frameworks. All playbook runs should produce structured, centralized logs. Configure thelog_pathinansible.cfgand ship logs to a SIEM: ansible-lintcatches security misconfigurations before code reaches infrastructure. It ships with asecurityprofile and integrates into pre-commit hooks and CI pipelines. Every Ansible change should pass a security gate before merging. A minimal pipeline checks syntax, linting, and runs Molecule tests against a hardened image. Ansible Automation Controller (formerly AWX / Tower) provides multi-tenant RBAC over inventories, credentials, job templates, and organizations. Access control is applied at the object level.