Vault sprawl means duplicated secrets, fragmented access, and unclear ownership. Learn how GitGuardian's NHI Governance restores control across the enterprise.

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Vault sprawl — the uncontrolled proliferation of secret storage systems across an organization — emerges when siloed teams independently adopt different vaults, CI secret stores, and cloud-native secret managers. This leads to duplicated credentials, fragmented access control, unclear ownership, and governance failures that map directly to OWASP's Non-Human Identity Top 10 risks. The 2025 State of Secrets Sprawl report found 23.77 million hard-coded credentials added to public GitHub repos in 2024 alone, a 25% YoY increase. Addressing vault sprawl requires treating secrets and NHIs as shared enterprise infrastructure: building a full lifecycle inventory, enforcing least privilege based on real usage, automating rotation, and maintaining a common control plane across vault types. GitGuardian's NHI Governance platform is presented as a solution that connects to existing vaults (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, CyberArk Conjur), provides unified visibility, and offers a Push-to-Vault workflow to convert detected leaks into governed secrets.

Confronting Vault Sprawl And The Risks It Brings

Secrets Sprawl Sets The Stage For Vault Sprawl

Enterprise NHI Governance Means Solving Vault (and Secrets) Sprawl

How GitGuardian Can Help You End Vault Sprawl

Visibility Is The Foundation Of NHI Governance