P. Madhuri 01 01 The rapid adoption of cloudnative architectures microservices and APIdriven applications has significantly increased the exposure of sensitive credentials tokens and cryptographic keys within enterprise environments Traditional approaches to secrets management often rely on static credentials and manual rotation processes creating security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors This paper presents an adaptive secrets management and runtime security enforcement framework designed to enhance the protection of modern enterprise APIs The proposed framework integrates automated secret discovery dynamic credential rotation policydriven access control and realtime runtime monitoring to mitigate risks associated with secret leakage unauthorized access and API abuse By leveraging continuous security validation and behavioral analytics the system detects anomalous activities and enforces security policies during application execution The framework also supports seamless integration with cloud platforms containerized workloads and DevSecOps pipelines enabling organizations to maintain security without compromising operational efficiency A comprehensive analysis of contemporary API security challenges demonstrates that adaptive secrets management combined with runtime protection significantly improves resilience against credential compromise insider threats and sophisticated cyberattacks The proposed approach contributes to the development of secure scalable and compliant API ecosystems capable of addressing evolving enterprise security requirements Copyright (c) Journal of Science Engineering Technology and Management Science. All rights reserved 2026