Controlling access to sensitive data can be difficult during an application development effort. A developer may not be authorized to see the data that is to be used by the application. Credentials used in a development environment to access development data can require modification when the application is migrated to a deployed environment. Changing the code in the deployed environment increases risks of change induced incidents. The technology disclosed allows for the creation of a named credential object, where the credentials for different environments are stored, and where the named credential object is called by metadata. This allows the promotion of code from a development environment to a deployed environment without changes to code, and without giving access to sensitive data to the developer.