Topic starter
24/06/2026 10:37 pm
TL;DR: Akeyless says fragmented Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and Azure Key Vault estates make simple access questions take days because audit logs, RBAC, and policy enforcement stay siloed across clusters and backends. The governance gap is structural, not just operational, when secrets outgrow a single control plane.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Akeyless: “Akeyless Multi Vault Governance for HashiCorp Vault and Cloud Secrets Managers”.
Key questions
A: The main failure is answerability.
Q: Why does a fragmented compliance process create risk for governance and audit quality?
A: A fragmented process creates risk because evidence ends up scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and disconnected tasks, which slows review and weakens oversight.
Q: How do identity teams know whether secrets governance is actually working?
A: Identity teams know secrets governance is working when they can prove that every active secret has an owner, an approved scope, and a tested revocation path.
Practitioner guidance
- Map the full secret estate Inventory every Vault cluster, cloud secrets manager, and application-facing secret path so you can see where governance is fragmented across backends.
- Standardise audit evidence collection Route access events from each backend into a single SIEM or evidence store and verify that missing log sources are treated as a control failure, not a reporting gap.
- Overlay enterprise RBAC on local controls Apply one governance layer across clusters and secret managers so access decisions are consistent even when the underlying stores remain distributed.
Bottom line: Fragmented Vault and cloud secret estates create a governance gap when access decisions and evidence are split across backends.
What's in the full article
Akeyless's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step governance flow for Multi-Vault Governance across Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and Azure Key Vault
- HashiCorp Vault Proxy behaviour, including how existing CLI workflows keep working without code changes
- A live-demo walkthrough of unified RBAC, rotation, and audit logging across multiple backends
- Licensing and deployment detail for MVG, HVP, and gateway placement in real environments
👉 Read Akeyless's analysis of vault governance gaps across fragmented secret estates →
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25/06/2026 7:22 am
Secret estate fragmentation is a governance problem before it is a platform problem: the article shows that access control, audit evidence, and rotation policy lose meaning when they are split across many clusters and cloud backends. A team can have strong controls inside each store and still fail to answer a simple enterprise access question with confidence. The practitioner conclusion is that secret governance must be assessed at the estate level, not the product level.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 44% of organisations are currently using a dedicated secrets management system, according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When should organisations centralise control instead of trying to migrate every secret store?
A: When the estate is too distributed to replace in one move, centralising control first is often the practical option. A governance overlay can unify access policy and audit evidence while leaving secrets in place. That approach is especially useful when operational dependencies make a full migration unrealistic in the near term.
👉 Read our full editorial: Akeyless on Vault governance gaps across fragmented secret estates