TL;DR: Akeyless argues that traditional secrets management remains weighed down by infrastructure overhead, fragmented control, and weak lifecycle handling, while its vaultless SaaS model and Zero-Knowledge design aim to simplify rotation, access, and auditability across hybrid environments. The core governance question is no longer where secrets are stored, but whether secrets, certificates, and machine access can be controlled without persistent operational sprawl.
At a glance
What this is: This is a secrets management analysis of vaultless SaaS architecture, with the key finding that control problems now sit in lifecycle governance rather than storage alone.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and NHI teams have to decide whether a SaaS control plane can reduce vault sprawl without weakening accountability, rotation, or audit coverage.
👉 Read Akeyless's analysis of vaultless secrets governance and hybrid access control
Context
Traditional secrets management has often forced teams to choose between infrastructure burden and control sprawl. Vault-based deployments can centralise storage but still leave rotation, revocation, audit, and access policy fragmented across tools and environments.
Akeyless frames vaultless secrets governance as a way to remove the operational overhead of self-managed vaults while preserving control over secrets, credentials, certificates, and keys. For IAM and NHI programmes, the important question is not whether the vault exists, but whether the lifecycle of machine credentials stays governable when access is delivered as SaaS.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when secrets are still stored outside managed vaults?
A: Secrets become easy to reuse across humans, scripts, and agents without a consistent audit trail. That increases the chance of exposure, weakens revocation, and makes it unclear which identity used the credential. A vault is only useful if it is the normal access path, not an optional store.
Q: Why do secrets, certificates, and machine access create more risk when they are managed separately?
A: Separate control planes make it easy for one identity type to outlive the others. A certificate may expire while a token remains active, or a workload secret may still work after a service account changes. Unified lifecycle control matters because attackers exploit the least-governed credential, not the most visible one.
Q: What are the signs that secrets management is failing in a hybrid environment?
A: Common warning signs include secrets scattered across multiple platforms, inconsistent rotation practices, duplicated credentials, and unclear ownership across cloud and on-premise systems. If teams cannot see where a secret lives or who can use it, governance is already weak. A mature programme should be able to inventory, control, rotate, and revoke secrets consistently everywhere they exist.
Q: How should IAM teams decide whether to adopt vaultless secrets governance?
A: They should choose based on lifecycle control, workload binding, and operational simplification rather than storage preference alone. If the existing model is creating vault sprawl, manual rotation work, or weak auditability, a vaultless approach can be justified. If it does not reduce those problems, the migration only changes the packaging.
Technical breakdown
Vaultless secrets governance and zero-knowledge access
Vaultless architecture replaces customer-operated storage with on-demand access through a SaaS control plane. In this model, secrets are not treated as static objects sitting in a managed vault, but as governed credentials whose retrieval, rotation, and revocation are policy-driven. Zero-Knowledge design matters because the platform should not be able to decrypt customer material in full, which changes the trust boundary and the audit model. The control objective shifts from protecting a vault server to governing who can request secrets, under what conditions, and with what cryptographic separation.
Practical implication: treat the control plane as part of your trust boundary and test whether it can prove separation of duties and non-recoverability.
Secret lifecycle automation across cloud-native and hybrid environments
The operational burden in secrets management is rarely the secret store itself. The harder problem is keeping creation, rotation, revocation, and expiry aligned across CI/CD, Kubernetes, service accounts, and cloud workloads. A vaultless approach is only useful if it reduces the number of places where lifecycle logic has to be duplicated. That means the security model must follow the identity that uses the secret, not just the application that stores it. When lifecycle automation is inconsistent, fragmentation returns in another form: policy drift rather than vault drift.
Practical implication: map each secret class to a single lifecycle owner and validate that rotation and revocation behave consistently across environments.
Just-in-time credentials and machine identity governance
Temporary credentials and ephemeral access reduce standing exposure, but they do not eliminate governance obligations. For machine identities, the crucial questions are issuance scope, expiry enforcement, and whether access can be tied to workload context rather than embedded in code or configuration. This is especially relevant where services, pipelines, and AI workloads request secrets dynamically at runtime. A secrets platform that supports just-in-time issuance changes the access pattern, but only strong identity binding prevents the system from becoming another layer of reusable privilege.
Practical implication: validate that time-bound credentials are truly ephemeral and tied to workload identity, not simply hidden behind a different interface.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker wants to turn exposed or overextended machine credentials into durable access across cloud and hybrid environments.
- Entry occurs when secrets are embedded in pipelines, applications, or workload configuration and can be reused outside the intended runtime context.
- Credential access follows when static secrets, API keys, or certificates are copied, leaked, or shared across environments without tight lifecycle control.
- Privilege escalation happens when one exposed credential unlocks broader machine access than the original workload required.
- Impact is realised through unauthorised access to cloud resources, runtime systems, or sensitive data protected by those machine credentials.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Toyota T-Connect key exposure 2022: A subcontractor left a T-Connect server key on public GitHub from 2017 to 2022; 296,019 customers' emails were exposed, misuse unknown.
- ASP.NET machine key attacks 2025: Developers copied ASP.NET machine keys from public sources; attackers used one to run Godzilla via ViewState. Microsoft found 3,000+ such keys.
Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 150+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Vaultless architecture shifts the governance problem from storage to lifecycle. The article is strongest when read as a control-plane story, not a product story. Centralised storage is only one part of secrets governance; rotation, revocation, audit, and workload binding are the controls that determine whether machine access remains bounded. The practitioner implication is that replacing a vault does not remove the need for lifecycle discipline.
Zero-Knowledge design changes the trust model, but not the accountability model. If the platform cannot assemble customer secrets in full, that reduces one exposure class. It does not remove the need to prove who can request access, what conditions govern that request, and how revocation is enforced across identities. The implication is that governance teams must treat cryptographic separation and administrative accountability as separate controls.
Secret sprawl is the real operational debt behind many vault modernisation projects. Fragmented vault instances, multiple access paths, and inconsistent rotation rules create a control surface that outgrows manual oversight. A vaultless SaaS model only helps if it actually compresses that sprawl instead of relocating it into policy exceptions and integration exceptions. Practitioners should measure whether the number of credential control points is shrinking or merely moving.
Vaultless secrets governance belongs in the same conversation as NHI lifecycle management. Secrets, certificates, service accounts, and AI workloads are all non-human identity concerns when they are used to authenticate systems at runtime. The governance question is whether each credential has an owner, an expiry rule, and a revocation path that works across environments. The implication is that NHI programmes should evaluate secrets platforms by lifecycle control, not by storage model alone.
Runtime access should be judged by blast radius, not by convenience. A system that makes secret retrieval easier can still be mis-governed if it widens access scope or weakens review discipline. The strongest signal in the article is that modern secrets platforms now sit at the intersection of IAM, PAM, and workload identity. The practitioner takeaway is to test how much damage a single credential can do when access is misissued or delayed in revocation.
From our research library:
- 88% of security professionals are concerned about secrets sprawl, with 49% of those in larger organisations described as "very concerned", according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
- Companies are dedicating an average of 32.4% of their security budgets to secrets management and code security, with US organisations leading at 40.8%, according to the State of Secrets in AppSec.
- Read next: Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge
What this signals
Secret sprawl is the underlying governance debt. A vaultless control plane only improves the programme if it reduces the number of places where secrets can be issued, cached, and forgotten. Otherwise, the organisation has replaced one kind of complexity with another and left the lifecycle problem intact.
Control of machine access now sits with the lifecycle owner, not the storage team. That shifts attention from vault administration to runtime issuance, expiry enforcement, and revocation proof. IAM, PAM, and NHI teams should treat secrets platforms as governance infrastructure, not as a storage utility.
For practitioners
- Map secrets lifecycle ownership Assign clear ownership for creation, rotation, revocation, and expiry across secrets, certificates, and machine credentials. If no team owns the whole lifecycle, policy drift will reappear even when storage is centralised.
- Reduce secret control points Inventory vault instances, CI/CD secret stores, and workload-level credential caches, then remove duplicate paths where the same secret can be issued or retrieved in multiple places.
- Bind credentials to workload identity Require runtime credentials to be tied to the workload, service account, or automation context that requested them, so the secret cannot be reused outside the intended execution scope.
- Test revocation under hybrid conditions Validate that a revoked secret stops working across cloud, on-prem, Kubernetes, and CI/CD environments, not just in the system where it was issued.
- Measure standing credential exposure Track how many machine credentials remain valid without expiry or rotation, because standing secrets are the clearest indicator that governance is still dependent on manual intervention.
Key takeaways
- The core issue is not whether secrets are stored in a vault, but whether their lifecycle remains governable across cloud and hybrid environments.
- The article positions vaultless SaaS and Zero-Knowledge design as a way to reduce operational overhead, but governance still depends on rotation, revocation, and workload binding.
- IAM and NHI teams should evaluate secrets platforms by how much they reduce sprawl, standing access, and manual lifecycle work.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and MITRE ATT&CK address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 — Secret Leakage | The article centres on secrets handling, exposure risk, and the control value of reducing leaked credential paths. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | The piece repeatedly contrasts static, persistent secrets with temporary access and expiry-based governance. | |
| NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | The article discusses machine access and access scope, which directly map to overprivileged non-human identities. | |
| Recommendation — Scan for secret leakage paths and revoke credentials that can still be discovered outside governed lifecycle controls. Replace long-lived secrets with expiry-bound credentials and enforce rotation where standing access persists. Reduce secret scope so each non-human identity can only access the minimum runtime permissions it actually needs. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | The article is about governing machine access, entitlement scope, and authorisation across environments. |
| Recommendation — Review entitlements for secrets access and align authorisation to workload context rather than static inheritance. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Secrets, API keys, and certificates are authenticators whose lifecycle is central to the article. |
| Recommendation — Apply authenticator management controls to track issuance, rotation, revocation, and expiry for all machine credentials. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006;TA0008 — Credential Access; Lateral Movement | The article's risk model is that exposed secrets become reusable access for expansion across environments. |
| Recommendation — Map exposed machine credentials to credential access and lateral movement paths in detection and response. | ||
Key terms
- Vaultless Architecture: A vaultless architecture delivers secrets through a managed service instead of a customer-operated vault server. The governance challenge does not disappear; it shifts to policy, identity, and runtime control over when secrets can be issued, retrieved, and revoked.
- Zero-knowledge encryption model: An encryption design where the provider cannot read the stored data because decryption keys are held by the user or derived locally. For identity programmes, this reduces provider visibility but does not remove the need to govern recovery paths, enrollment state, and administrative authority around access continuity.
- Secret Lifecycle Automation: Secret lifecycle automation governs how credentials are created, rotated, revoked, and expired without manual intervention. In NHI programmes, it is the control that determines whether a secret remains a bounded runtime credential or becomes a persistent liability.
- Workload Identity: The identity assigned to a software workload, such as a containerised application, serverless function, or microservice, enabling it to authenticate to other services without storing static credentials.
What's in the full article
Akeyless's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How its vaultless architecture is implemented across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments
- How zero-knowledge handling and Distributed Fragments Cryptography are positioned in the platform design
- How the platform describes secrets rotation, revocation, and just-in-time access workflows
- How the article frames compliance, auditability, and migration considerations for existing vault users
Deepen your knowledge
NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on August 17, 2026.
Updated on October 7, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org