Blog
2 July, 2026
Credentials, certificates, and encryption keys rarely feel urgent until they do.
In most organizations, they just accumulate. A secret tucked into application code here, another buried in a CI/CD pipeline there. Teams build workarounds, systems evolve, and everything keeps running well enough that nobody stops to ask: wait, do we actually have a handle on all of this?
It doesn’t usually announce itself with a breach or a dramatic failure. It sneaks up on you. Nobody’s quite sure who owns what. Policies get applied differently from one team to the next. Rotating credentials or running an audit becomes a tedious manual slog that eats up more time than anyone wants to admit.
On the surface, nothing looks broken. But beneath the surface, operational control is eroding.
When Growth Outpaces Governance
This is a pattern TeraSky sees regularly in large, complex enterprise environments – organizations juggling big application ecosystems, extensive automation, and sensitive operational infrastructure.
As these environments grow, secrets management tends to grow alongside them, just not in any particularly organized way. Eventually, you reach a point where even basic questions become surprisingly hard to answer:
- Where are our secrets actually stored?
- Who owns them?
- How are they being managed day to day?
- Are our policies being applied consistently across the board?
When you can’t answer those questions confidently, friction sets in everywhere. Security teams are always playing catch-up. Audits become reactive firefighting rather than routine checkups. Developers and ops teams end up working around inconsistent processes, and every infrastructure change carries more risk than it should.
The industry learned this lesson once already with DevSecOps: security bolted on after the fact costs orders of magnitude more than security built in from the start. Secrets management is the same story, just more subtle.
What’s accelerating this today is the explosion of non-human identities like service accounts, CI/CD bots, automation pipelines, AI agents. Machine identities now outnumber human ones in most enterprise environments, and they’re being provisioned with the same credential hygiene that plagued application code a decade ago.
Nobody planned to end up here. It’s just what happens when environments evolve faster than the people managing them can keep up.
Reintroducing Structure and Control
TeraSky recently worked with a major financial infrastructure organization that had hit exactly this wall. Over the years, credentials, certificates, and encryption keys had spread across so many applications and workflows that centralized governance had become nearly impossible. The company needed a way to regain control without ripping anything apart or grinding development to a halt.
The solution was a centralized secrets management platform built on HashiCorp Vault Enterprise and deployed by TeraSky in partnership with IBM, ensuring it fit into the organization’s existing security, compliance, and infrastructure governance model rather than adding yet another silo.
Instead of secrets hardcoded into applications or scattered across config files, every credential, certificate, and encryption key now flows through a single governed system. Applications and automation workflows request secrets dynamically; they’re issued on demand, scoped to least privilege, and automatically rotated or expired. Certificate lifecycle management, encryption key governance, and policy enforcement are centralized, auditable, and cleanly integrated with existing systems.
The Deeper Risk
David Gidony, TeraSky’s DevSecOps Solution Architect, puts it plainly: “Secrets management tends to evolve without structure. Over time, organizations lose a clear understanding of what exists, where it’s used, and how it’s being managed. Centralization is what brings that control back.”
With secrets sprawl, a bigger attack surface is the obvious cost. The hidden cost is the slow erosion of visibility and confidence across your entire environment. You’re not sure what you have, you’re not sure it’s governed consistently, and you won’t know there’s a problem until something forces you to look. In regulated industries, that forcing function is called an audit. Scrambling to reconstruct credential lineage under examiner scrutiny is a significantly worse way to discover your secrets management gaps than finding them yourself.
The fact that AI agents, RAG pipelines, and LLM-integrated workflows are being deployed right now with the same credential hygiene that plagued microservices five years ago — API keys in environment variables, hardcoded tokens, no rotation policy – only compounds the problem. Effectively, the attack surface is rebuilt from scratch in every new AI project.
If you can’t rotate a secret in under an hour without a change freeze and three Slack threads, you don’t have a secrets management practice. You have a hope strategy.