Think of the problems credit card processors deal with: Hiding the keys themselves from their own employees, so that getting a root password is not enough to be able to just take all the credit card information. You don't want the key in any filesystem, and you don't want the key in an easy to retrieve memory location. You end up with servers that require multiple people to boot up, as the keys only really appear when multiple people provide their own piece of the secret.
Eventually, enough security leads to the risk of data loss, as an error can make the keys become unrecoverable.
This is why we have to add security breach detection, and make recovering from a breach easy and having low consequences. Linus said that with enough eyeballs, all buts are shallow. With enough attackers, all systems are insecure.