Understanding the Problem

At first glance, secret rotation seems straightforward: when someone leaves the company or their access changes, the credentials they touched should be updated. In practice, this process breaks down quickly. Companies accumulate thousands of secrets, access paths multiply, usage is hard to see, and vaults reflect years of organic growth. The result is a workflow that depends on knowledge no one actually has. The points below break down the underlying factors that make offboarding and access-driven rotation challenging in almost every organization.

1. Offboarding processes focus on accounts, not secretsMost companies reliably disable user accounts during offboarding — SSO, email, VPN, GitHub, Slack and so on. This closes the visible doors, but not the "invisible" ones. The secrets a person still knows or copied elsewhere — passwords, API keys, tokens, certificates, database logins — usually remain untouched. Without rotation, a departing employee's knowledge continues to grant access long after their primary workplace accounts are closed, creating a blind spot that many businesses underestimate.
2. Modern companies accumulate more secrets than they can realistically trackEven small companies with 20 or 50 people quickly build up a few hundred credentials. As organizations grow to 100, 1,000 or 10,000 employees, the number of secrets scales with them — into the tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands. These credentials live across vaults, folders, shared spaces and legacy tools. As the inventory explodes, visibility collapses: no one can say with confidence what exists, where it lives, or why it was created. We call it "Credential Chaos". This sheer volume alone makes consistent, thoughtful rotation almost impossible without dedicated tooling.
3. Secrets should be rotated whenever access changes — not only when people leaveAccess changes constantly in modern organizations. People switch teams, external contractors temporarily join, and credentials get shared with partners or vendors to keep business moving. Every one of these events should trigger rotation, because access — not employment status — determines exposure. Yet in almost all companies, rotation only happens (if at all) when someone leaves, and even then not systematically.
4. Rotation becomes guesswork without dataShared accounts and sensitive credentials spread across many vaults and tools: API keys for internal services, private keys for deployments, tokens for automation, database credentials for debugging, legacy admin accounts that still work. Over time, the record of who could reach what — and which secrets they actually used — becomes fuzzy. When teams don't know which credentials were accessible, relevant or actively used, rotation turns into intuition rather than evidence. Under pressure, people default to the path of least resistance: they rotate nothing, or at best a couple of obvious items that come to mind, while the majority of meaningful secrets remain unchanged.

How Gorilla solves it

Gorilla turns offboarding and secret rotation into a structured workflow instead of a manual investigation. For every user whose access changes or who leaves the company, Gorilla creates a dedicated offboarding case and correlates what the person could access with what they actually used. That lets teams focus on the secrets that matter, rather than trying to rotate everything blindly. Where rotation is required, Gorilla surfaces concrete Findings that show exactly which items need to be updated and why.

Offboarding, however, isn't limited to rotation alone. Sometimes a user accesses sensitive items shortly before departure, or interacts with credentials in ways that warrant closer review. Gorilla highlights these edge cases as part of the offboarding case, giving teams the context they need to close it cleanly and confidently.

The same mechanism applies outside offboarding. Whether a credential is weak, widely shared, exposed externally or otherwise at risk, Gorilla raises targeted Findings that point directly to the affected items and the recommended actions. Teams get clear, item-level guidance on where rotation or follow-up is needed — consistently, and without guesswork.