Orphaned secrets, such as forgotten API keys, tokens, and credentials, pose significant security risks by potentially enabling unauthorized access, privilege escalation, and lateral movement within systems. These secrets often become orphaned due to rapid development cycles, team turnover, and system evolution, leading to credentials being scattered and forgotten across various locations like configuration files and repositories. To mitigate these risks, centralized secret management platforms like Doppler offer solutions by providing centralized visibility, automatic secret rotation, and integration into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring that credentials are dynamically managed and not left in vulnerable states. This centralized approach makes secret management an integral part of the development workflow, simplifying audits, access control, and lifecycle management, and significantly reducing the likelihood of security incidents stemming from forgotten credentials.