TL;DR: Akeyless finds that secrets fragmented across AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, and similar tools make policy enforcement, logging, and revocation inconsistent. The governance problem is not tool count alone, but the control-plane drift that appears when secrets are managed in parallel systems with different review cycles.
At a glance
What this is: This is an analysis of secrets manager sprawl and how fragmented control planes weaken policy enforcement, auditability, and revocation across cloud and Kubernetes environments.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM, NHI, and platform teams cannot govern credentials well when ownership, logging, and offboarding are split across multiple secrets systems.
👉 Read Akeyless's analysis of secrets manager sprawl and centralized oversight
Context
Secrets manager sprawl is the condition where credentials, tokens, certificates, and related secrets are distributed across multiple tools instead of governed through a single operational model. In hybrid cloud environments, that creates a control problem before it becomes a tooling problem.
The issue is especially relevant to NHI governance because secrets often belong to service accounts, workloads, automation pipelines, and application integrations rather than people. When those identities are spread across different secret stores, policy drift and revocation gaps become easier to miss.
Akeyless frames this as a centralised oversight problem, but the deeper issue is lifecycle consistency across multiple control planes. The article is about the governance consequences of fragmentation, not about replacing one secret store with another.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when secrets are managed across multiple managers instead of one governed control plane?
A: Policy enforcement becomes inconsistent because each system can define logging, rotation, and access controls differently. The practical failure is not just more admin work. Teams lose a single audit trail and a reliable revocation path, so the same secret class may be governed to different standards depending on where it lives.
Q: Why does secrets sprawl increase operational and compliance risk for NHI programmes?
A: Because the secret is the identity credential for a workload, service, or automation path. When those credentials are split across platforms, ownership, evidence, and offboarding become fragmented, which makes it harder to prove access was removed, rotated, or reviewed consistently across the estate.
Q: What are the signs that a secrets management programme is failing?
A: Common warning signs include inconsistent secret formats, missing scans in configuration files or side repositories, frequent false positives, and teams relying on manual checks instead of automation. Another red flag is when secrets remain exposed long enough to be reused. If scanning does not cover the full development ecosystem, control gaps usually persist.
Q: Should teams centralise secrets governance before migrating secrets into a new platform?
A: Often yes. If the immediate problem is fragmented policy, logging, and revocation, central oversight can reduce risk without forcing a disruptive migration. The key is to confirm that governance improves across every connected store, not just the repository you choose to make primary.
Technical breakdown
Why secrets manager sprawl breaks governance consistency
Secrets manager sprawl means the same organisation is enforcing access, rotation, logging, and deletion through different systems that do not share one governance model. Each manager may expose different policy constructs, audit formats, and operational workflows, so the effective control design becomes uneven even when the intent is consistent. That matters because a secret is not just stored data. It is an authentication path for an NHI, and that path becomes harder to govern when it is replicated across AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, Kubernetes, and other platforms.
Practical implication: map each secrets system to the same governance standard and identify where policy, logging, or ownership diverges.
How fragmented secrets stores weaken audit and revocation
A central secrets plane gives teams one place to see who accessed what, but fragmented stores split those records across multiple logs and consoles. That slows investigation and makes revocation less reliable because administrators have to know where every copy or derivative of a secret lives. In practice, the risk is not only exposure. It is inconsistent containment, where one store is cleaned up while another remains active. For NHIs, that is a lifecycle issue as much as a detection issue.
Practical implication: verify that revocation and audit coverage work across every connected secrets store, not just the primary one.
Why one access point can help without forcing migration
A unified access layer changes the operating model by separating governance from physical secret location. That allows teams to centralise control, monitoring, and authentication while leaving secrets in their native platforms where application requirements demand it. Technically, this is useful when migration would introduce risk, break integrations, or create developer friction. The real architectural question is not whether one vault holds everything. It is whether one policy and one review process can govern everything that matters.
Practical implication: prefer governance consolidation first, then decide case by case whether actual secret migration is necessary.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Hugging Face Spaces breach 2024: Unauthorised access to Hugging Face Spaces may have exposed secrets users stored for AI apps; tokens were revoked and org tokens removed.
- OneLogin API flaw (CVE-2025-59363): A OneLogin API flaw exposed OIDC client secrets to anyone with an API key, including vendors (CVE-2025-59363); fixed with no customer impact.
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
Secrets manager sprawl is a governance failure before it is a storage problem. When secrets live in separate control planes, policy enforcement becomes local instead of enterprise-wide. That creates different audit standards, different revocation paths, and different accountability models for the same credential class. The practitioner conclusion is simple: if secrets cannot be governed consistently, central oversight is only a label, not a control.
Control-plane drift is the named risk this article exposes. The issue is not merely that organisations use multiple tools. It is that each tool can create its own review rhythm, logging format, and ownership boundary. That fragmentation makes it difficult to prove who can access which secret at any moment. Practitioners should treat drift across secrets systems as an NHI lifecycle failure mode, not a convenience trade-off.
Unified access does not eliminate secrets sprawl, but it can shrink the governance gap. The article shows why central visibility matters even when native cloud and Kubernetes secret stores must remain in place. The important field lesson is that governance can be centralised without forcing a disruptive migration. The practitioner conclusion is to separate control consolidation from platform consolidation.
Secret trees matter because revocation is rarely single-object only. The article notes the ability to revoke not just one secret but entire trees of secrets. That is the right mental model for systems where one credential fans out into related access paths across environments. The practitioner conclusion is that offboarding logic must follow secret lineage, not just individual secret names.
Secrets manager sprawl is increasingly an NHI boundary problem, not an application storage problem. Credentials, certificates, and tokens are operational identities for workloads and services, so fragmented custody directly affects identity governance. When those secrets are split across AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, and vault layers, the IAM team loses a single authoritative view of entitlement and lifecycle. The practitioner conclusion is to govern the secret as the identity, not just as data.
From our research library:
- 54% of organisations are dissatisfied with their current secrets management solution because not all secrets are secured, and 43% cite lack of central management, according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
- Read next: Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge
What this signals
Secrets manager sprawl should be treated as a lifecycle governance issue, not a tooling preference. When revocation, logging, and ownership are split across native cloud stores, Kubernetes, and vault layers, the programme no longer has one authoritative place to prove that access was removed.
Control-plane drift: this is the practical failure mode behind fragmented secrets estates. Policies may exist, but they execute unevenly when teams rely on different managers, different connector patterns, and different evidence sources. The average of 6 distinct secrets manager instances, according to the State of Secrets in AppSec, is a warning that central oversight has to be designed, not assumed.
For practitioners
- Inventory every secret store and connector path List each secrets platform in use, including cloud-native stores, Kubernetes secrets, and any connector or gateway that can reach them. Document who owns each store, which identities authenticate to it, and which workflows depend on it.
- Standardise audit coverage across secret stores Confirm that access logging, retention, and review procedures produce comparable evidence across all systems, not just the primary vault. Make sure investigators can trace access to a secret even when the secret moves through connectors or sync layers.
- Define enterprise revocation logic for secret trees Treat related secrets as a lineage problem so that revocation can remove dependent credentials, replicas, and downstream access paths together. Test whether offboarding a workload or integration actually removes access in every connected store.
- Separate governance consolidation from platform migration Decide whether the priority is one policy and review process or one physical repository. In many hybrid environments, the operational win comes from central oversight first, while secret migration remains optional and use-case specific.
Key takeaways
- Secrets sprawl weakens the operational controls that matter most, especially auditability, consistent policy enforcement, and dependable revocation across connected platforms.
- The evidence in the article points to a fragmented operating model rather than a single product problem, which is why governance consistency is the real issue.
- Practitioners should focus on enterprise-wide oversight of secret stores, connector paths, and revocation logic before deciding whether any migration is necessary.
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 addresses the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 — Secret Leakage | Fragmented secret stores make leakage harder to detect and contain across systems. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | Sprawl often leaves secrets active longer than intended because rotation is inconsistent. | |
| NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | Revocation gaps appear when credentials remain active in one store after another is updated. | |
| Recommendation — Scan all connected stores for exposed secrets and revoke anything discovered immediately. Shorten secret lifetimes and enforce rotation across every connected secrets manager. Tie offboarding to complete revocation across all secret copies and connector paths. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | IA-5 directly governs the lifecycle of authenticators and their rotation. |
| Recommendation — Apply authenticators management controls to unify secret rotation, storage, and revocation. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | The article is fundamentally about consistent authorisation across multiple secret systems. |
| Recommendation — Standardise access permissions and entitlements across all connected secrets platforms. | ||
Key terms
- Secrets Sprawl: The uncontrolled proliferation of sensitive credentials, API keys, tokens, passwords, certificates, across codebases, cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines, and configuration files. In 2024, over 50 million leaked secrets were found on the dark web.
- Control plane drift: Control plane drift is the gradual mismatch between intended security or operational policy and the actual state of a system’s control layer. It occurs when configuration changes, automation, or exceptions accumulate without review. In identity and cloud environments, drift can weaken access controls, logging, segmentation, and enforcement consistency.
- Secret Tree: A set of related secrets that share lineage, dependencies, or downstream access paths. Thinking in secret trees helps practitioners revoke not just one credential but every dependent secret and replica that could preserve access after an offboarding event or compromise.
- Connector Path: The route by which a governance layer communicates with a native secrets manager or workload store. Connector paths matter because they determine how access is authenticated, how changes are synchronised, and whether logging and revocation remain consistent across systems.
What's in the full article
Akeyless's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step demonstration of the Universal Secrets Connector across AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, and Kubernetes
- Configuration details for setting up targets, including tokens, service accounts, and endpoint details
- Sync behaviour for adding, editing, and deleting secrets through the connector layer
- Examples of centralized logging and single-point authentication across multiple native secrets managers
Deepen your knowledge
NHI governance, secrets management, and workload identity security 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 8, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org