Strong governance is essential for managing secrets like API keys, database credentials, and encryption keys to ensure control, visibility, and best practices are followed without slowing development. Without it, teams risk exposing sensitive data, violating compliance requirements, and introducing operational inefficiencies. A modern approach to secrets governance enforces access control, auditability, and automated secret rotation while integrating directly into engineering workflows, resulting in stronger security, reduced operational overhead, and a scalable approach to managing sensitive data.