In modern enterprise security architectures, a vault or secrets manager is a centralized system designed to securely store, manage and control access to secrets such as passwords, API keys, tokens, certificates, and encryption keys. These vaults act as the digital safes of the enterprise, ensuring that sensitive credentials are not hardcoded into applications or scattered across scripts, configuration files, and cloud workloads. As organizations increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure, automation and software-driven operations, vaults have become foundational to maintaining trust, enforcing least privilege, and enabling secure access at scale.
Today, the importance of vaults has grown exponentially – and so has the risk associated with mismanaging them. The rapid adoption of cloud services and the explosion of non-human identities (NHIs), including workloads, services and AI agents, have fundamentally changed the identity landscape. Where organizations once managed a small multiple of machine identities relative to human users, ratios have now ballooned from 1:5 to 1:10 or even 1:20, with projections climbing toward 1:40 or more. AI-driven and autonomous agents are accelerating this trend, creating vast numbers of entities that require secure, automated access to systems.
Vaults are the mechanism that makes this possible. They issue and manage the secrets that allow service-to-service communication, application access, and workload authentication across environments such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Many organizations rely on third-party vaults or secret managers in addition to native cloud services to gain interoperability, centralized governance, and enhanced control. But as vault usage grows, so does the attack surface as well as the operational complexity.
A particularly dangerous byproduct of this growth is the emergence of shadow vaults. These are vaults spun up by DevOps teams or developers (often using freely available software) without the knowledge or oversight of security teams. While typically created to move fast and develop quickly, shadow vaults operate outside established security policies. They lack monitoring, access controls, and governance, turning what should be a protective measure into a hidden liability. Afterall, if security teams don’t know a vault exists, they can’t secure it.
The core issue is no longer just vault deployment – it’s vault awareness and observability. Organizations must understand what vaults exist, how they are accessed, and how secrets are actually used in real-world environments. There are three unresolved and critical issues surrounding vault security that enterprises must address.
• Securing the vault itself and knowing it exists
You cannot protect what you cannot see. Many organizations lack visibility into all the vaults operating across their environments, particularly those created by DevOps teams or embedded into AI-driven workflows. Identifying these vaults is the first step toward applying security policies, access controls, and compliance requirements. Without this awareness, vaults can become easy targets for attackers seeking high-value credentials.
• Securing access to the vault
Vaults are identity infrastructure and must be protected like any other critical access system. Attackers increasingly target vaults directly, attempting to bypass controls, exploit misconfigurations, or misuse roles to extract secrets. Unauthorized access may occur through compromised local accounts, excessive privileges, or role misuse by both humans and NHIs. Deep observability is required to trace who or what assumed a role, how that role was used, and whether access patterns align with intended behavior. This level of identity observability is essential to detect misuse before it becomes a breach.
• Securing the usage of secrets after withdrawal
Even when vault access is properly controlled, risk does not end once a secret is retrieved. In practice, secrets are often reused across multiple applications, embedded in scripts for convenience, or used beyond their intended lifecycle. Expired credentials may remain active, and secrets designed for non-human use frequently end up in human workflows. This misuse is common, especially in fast-moving DevOps environments, but it dramatically increases exposure. Organizations must be able to track where secrets are used, for what purpose, and whether that usage aligns with policy.
These challenges sit at the intersection of DevOps, SecOps, and identity teams. Developers focus on speed and functionality, while security teams focus on risk reduction and compliance. Vault observability bridges this gap by providing end-to-end insight from the identity that initiates access, to the role assumed, to the secret retrieved, and finally to how that secret is used in production.
As attackers increasingly target identity infrastructure, vaults have become high-value assets. They are no longer just storage mechanisms; they are enforcement points for enterprise security posture. Vault awareness and observability enable organizations to maintain hygiene, ensure compliance, and detect real-time threats in an environment dominated by automation and AI-driven identities.
In today’s enterprise, vault security is not optional – and identity observability and protection is the difference between control and chaos.
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Shlomi Yanai is CEO of Bethesda, Maryland-based AuthMind (www.authmind.com).
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