Confronting Vault Sprawl And The Risks It Brings

Modern enterprises often encounter "vault sprawl," a situation where secrets management systems proliferate uncontrollably across organizations due to rapid application development and the creation of new non-human identities (NHIs). This sprawl is exacerbated by "secrets sprawl," where credentials like API keys and tokens leak into plaintext across various platforms, leading to duplicated credentials and fragmented access controls. The issue stems from isolated teams adopting different secret management solutions without a unified strategy, resulting in governance challenges and security risks. GitGuardian offers a solution by integrating with existing secret managers to provide inventory and metadata, allowing for consistent visibility and governance across platforms. This approach enables organizations to consolidate their secrets management, reduce operational overhead, and improve governance by connecting secrets to the identities that use them, thus addressing the underlying NHI sprawl problem.