Confronting Vault Sprawl And The Risks It Brings
Modern enterprises do not set out to create a maze of credentials, keys, and secrets stores.
Confronting Vault Sprawl And The Risks It Brings
Modern enterprises do not set out to create a maze of credentials, keys, and secrets stores. However, this is the reality most organizations find themselves in as they ship applications faster than ever, creating many new non-human identities (NHIs) in the process. Any issues around secrets management are typically solved by isolated teams working in silos, using whatever tools are available.
We can refer to the end result of these disjointed efforts around secrets management as “Vault Sprawl.”
Vault sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of secret storage systems across an organization, driven by the rapid creation of new secrets needed to allow new workloads, scripts, bots, and now, agents to securely authenticate.
It shows up as multiple vault products and secret stores running at the same time, separate vault instances per team or environment, and the same credentials duplicated across tools because migrations are slow and integrations are uneven. Over time, it becomes difficult to answer basic questions like where a given secret lives, which copy is authoritative, and who can access it today.
Secrets Sprawl Sets The Stage For Vault Sprawl
Vault sprawl is directly related to the separate, perhaps riskier problem of secrets sprawl. Secret sprawl occurs when a credential leaks into plaintext across everyday engineering surfaces, then quietly spreads as it gets copied, reused, and forgotten.
That credential might be an API key, a token, or a database connection string that lands in source code or config. These sprawled secrets tend to keep showing up in new places because developers optimize for keeping systems running and unblocking deployments.
Unfortunately, we know this is a growing problem.
The 2025 State of Secrets Sprawl report found 23.77 million hard-coded credentials added to public GitHub repos in 2024 alone. This represents a 25% year-over-year increase. The same research found that this problem is at least eight times worse in private repositories that were scanned.
Vault Sprawl Is A Side Effect Of Good Intentions
When a problem shows up at that scale, teams respond the way teams always do under pressure: stop the bleeding in the places they can control. The obvious answer is to stop hardcoding secrets, but the question of how is often answered differently by each siloed team.
One group adopts the secret store that came with their cloud. Another relies on the built-in secret feature in their CI system. A platform team standardizes on a vault for Kubernetes. Each choice is defensible in isolation, but the organization pays the price for the lack of a single operating model.
Secret sprawl creates the initial urgency. Vault sprawl is the compounding side effect. The end state is duplicated credentials, fragmented access control, and unclear ownership, which makes rotations risky and incidents slower. It also makes governance harder because no one can state, with confidence, which systems contain the critical secrets and which copies are still live.
Developers Use Workarounds When Confused
Real evidence of a lack of a cohesive strategy across the whole enterprise shows up in a familiar place: leaked secrets. These are put there because a developer had a deadline and was not sure which vault held the right secret. Or because they deemed the “safe route” of requesting the correct access to be too slow. The State of Secrets report findings reinforce this, as we saw 5.1% of repositories using secrets managers still leaked secrets. Tooling does help, but it does not automatically create consistency across teams.
These secrets are not just in code, as secrets get copied into Jira tickets, Slack messages, documentation, and many other platforms around the software development cycle. Often, these are shared to help speed along a hotfix or to help the wider team work on an issue without getting proper access to the right vault. When secrets live in many places, this is, unfortunately, a predictable outcome.
Vault Sprawl Means Lack Of Governance
Governance is built on simple questions that need consistent answers:
Who owns that secret?
Which workload is allowed to use it?
Where is it stored?
Vault sprawl means there is no central source of truth, and getting to each answer becomes a negotiation across teams, tools, and ticket queues.
Vault sprawl means policies stop being global and become local. Each vault has its own access model, audit trail, and rotation workflow. That makes it hard to enforce least privilege, hard to prove environment separation, and hard to demonstrate consistent offboarding. Governance often becomes documentation-focused while operational reality continues to evolve at machine speeds.
Vault sprawl is a governance failure pattern that shows up as duplicated secrets, fragmented access, and unclear ownership. These issues directly map to the OWASP Non-Human Identities Top 10 for 2025, including:
Leaked Secrets – Exposed on public platforms or in plaintext inside internal systems
Cross-Environment Secrets Use – Shared secrets across environments.
Reused Secrets – The same credential is used in multiple places.
Duplicated Secrets – When the same secret exists in multiple vaults or locations.
Long-Lived Secrets – Secrets that have gone unrotated for months or years, which are often forgotten but still exploitable.
Vault sprawl is a governance problem because it turns identity and access into an organizational guessing game. This is the opposite of what auditors and regulators want to hear. They want clear answers to what state your environment was in when an unauthorized access event led to a material breach. They need to know that every effort was made to mitigate these risks.
The fix is not another vault or another policy doc. The solution is enterprise NHI governance that treats secrets storage, access, rotation, and lifecycle as one system with clear accountability across teams.
Enterprise NHI Governance Means Solving Vault (and Secrets) Sprawl
Fixing vault sprawl and getting to real governance means treating secrets and NHIs as shared enterprise infrastructure.
This starts with an inventory that covers the whole lifecycle of a secret, not just what lives in vaults. That means vaults, source code, CI/CD variables, build artifacts, and runtime environments. From that inventory, identify orphaned secrets, duplicated credentials, and stale access paths, then remove what is no longer needed.
This detection must be an ongoing effort but can also be shifted left, earlier in the workflow. Developers and DevOps teams need guardrails that catch secrets before they land in source control or get promoted into production. Pair tooling with clear standards so teams know where secrets belong and how to request access without slowing delivery.
Governance must also include lifecycle mapping and enriching secrets with metadata such as owner, intended workload, environment scope, and last rotation date. Use that to drive automated rotation, expiration, and renewal policies.
Finally, apply least privilege based on real usage. When you know which identities use each secret, you can tighten permissions, retire unused services, and reduce blast radius. For multi-cloud and M&A environments, consolidation matters, but a common control plane matters more. The goal is consistent policy and evidence, regardless of vault type.
How GitGuardian Can Help You End Vault Sprawl
Create One Source Of Truth Across Many Vaults
Vault sprawl gets dangerous when no one can answer, with confidence, where a secret lives, which copy is active, and which workload depends on it. GitGuardian tackles that by connecting to the vaults you already run and pulling back the signal you need for governance: inventory and metadata. This is designed to work across common secret managers like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and CyberArk Conjur, so teams can keep their operational preferences while leadership gets consistent visibility.
GitGuardian Connects to All Major Secret Managers
This also helps teams reduce operational overhead. Every additional vault adds licensing or consumption costs. But a bigger bill shows up as people’s time as they work to solve secrets sprawl. By identifying patterns and existing resources across the organization’s teams, they can build and maintain fewer vault integrations. Platform and security engineers can spend fewer cycles keeping the maze working and more time reducing other risks while accelerating delivery.
Turn “We Found A Leak” Into “This Is Now Governed”
Detection without follow-through is how secret sprawl turns into vault sprawl. GitGuardian’s Push-to-Vault workflow is built for the last mile: moving an exposed secret from an incident into the right vault path, using a controlled process that avoids copy-paste remediation. The workflow is designed to help teams secure the secret, track it to ensure it remains under control, and reduce the backlog that often forms after high-volume leak events.
Push-to-Vault feature in the GitGuardian workspace
Exec teams want fewer fire drills while devs want fewer broken deployments. For certain types of secrets, GitGuardian provides incident response teams with a repeatable way to decide what to do next based on impact: vault or revoke. Noncritical and isolated secrets can easily be revoked from your GitGuardian workspace.
Critical secrets that are already managed follow an established rotation path. Unmanaged secrets that are not yet in production can be pushed into the vault, with clear guidance for developers to update the reference. This turns tribal knowledge into a shared playbook, which is what governance looks like under pressure.
NHI Governance Connects Secrets To The Identities That Use Them
Vault sprawl is ultimately an NHI sprawl problem. GitGuardian’s NHI Governance is built to inventory non-human identities across the infrastructure, then use that inventory to drive security posture and lifecycle visibility. In practice, this helps teams map secrets to workloads, spot drift, and prove ownership, which is the foundation needed to align with the OWASP NHI risks you care about.
GitGuardian NHI Identities View showing breached policies
Progress has to be measurable, or NHI governance will remain a subject of debate rather than a coordinated program. GitGuardian NHI Governance helps you track movement over time using a performance dashboard that makes it easy to see which identities breached policies over time. This gives clear insight into if you are actually reducing risky patterns or just shifting them around.
In secret hygiene, vault coverage becomes a concrete metric, showing what percentage of secrets are stored in designated secret managers, plus an integration overview that highlights gaps in coverage across systems. Together, those views let you map progress from discovery to coverage, to fewer policy breaches, which is the practical definition of getting vault sprawl under governance.
GitGuardian’s NHI Governance Analytics
Visibility Is The Foundation Of NHI Governance
Vault sprawl is a symptom of what every enterprise is going through: the massive explosion of non-human identities that make up modern infrastructure. Each leaked secret, appearing in plaintext, outside the vault, brings real risks. It is also evidence of a breakdown in NHI Governance strategy and execution.
Organizations need complete visibility to address NHI Governance. Without clear visibility into where secrets live, how they move through the delivery pipeline, and which workloads depend on them, governance becomes paperwork, and incident response becomes guesswork.
GitGuardian supports that visibility by combining secrets detection with inventory and NHI governance signals. It helps teams identify exposed credentials, understand where they are still in use, and reduce duplication across stores. Over time, that turns vault sprawl from an assumed cost of doing business into a measurable program with ownership, coverage, and lifecycle controls.
We would love to work with you to eliminate vault (and secrets) sprawl.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from GitGuardian Blog – Take Control of Your Secrets Security authored by Dwayne McDaniel. Read the original post at: https://blog.gitguardian.com/confronting-vault-sprawl-and-the-risks-it-brings/
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