Microservices have transformed how modern applications are developed and deployed. By breaking large systems into smaller, independent services, organisations can scale faster, update incrementally, and adapt to market needs with agility. But this architectural evolution also brings a profound shift in the security landscape—particularly at the API layer, where microservices communicate.

As organisations race to modernise and adopt serverless computing and event-driven architectures, they unlock a new realm of agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. These paradigms promise frictionless scaling, near-instant execution, and seamless responsiveness to real-time demands. However, buried within these advances lies a subtle but growing threat—secrets in motion. Unlike static infrastructures, these new architectures operate on transient workloads, with credentials moving rapidly between services, environments, and memory states. And therein lies the risk: secrets are no longer only at rest—they are constantly in flight, dynamic, and difficult to govern.

In the high-velocity world of DevSecOps, vulnerability scanning has become a foundational control. It identifies known weaknesses, helps prioritise remediation, and ticks compliance boxes. But in the evolving threat landscape, scanning alone is no longer enough. While it may detect Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), it often fails to identify actual exploitable paths—especially those born from configuration drift, logical errors, or interconnected weaknesses.