Amazon's cloud business on Wednesday announced the launch of a service — called Secrets Manager — for storing important company information, such as passwords.

The service is Amazon's latest effort to bolster its security software offerings, but it also comes after a string of reports about attackers stealing passwords improperly stored on Amazon Web Services.

With this new service, "you never, ever put a secret again in your code," Amazon's chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, said during a presentation at AWS' San Francisco Summit on Wednesday.

The Secrets Manager tool arrives five years after AWS introduced a system for storing encryption keys powered by dedicated hardware security modules, and 3½ years after the cloud provider introduced a simpler service for that purpose. Google and Microsoft also offer key management services.