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  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Secrets Management
  4. Secrets Management
  5. IBM SKLM vs Vault

IBM SKLM vs Vault

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Vault
Vault
Stacks816
Followers802
Votes71
GitHub Stars33.4K
Forks4.5K
IBM SKLM
IBM SKLM
Stacks2
Followers4
Votes9

IBM SKLM vs Vault: What are the differences?

Key Differences between IBM SKLM and Vault

IBM SKLM (Security Key Lifecycle Manager) and Vault are both data encryption key management solutions, but they have some distinct differences. Here are the key differences:

  1. Integration and Scalability: IBM SKLM offers seamless integration with IBM Enterprise Key Management (EKM) solutions, enabling centralized key management across the entire organization. On the other hand, Vault provides integration with a wide range of cloud and on-premises systems, making it highly scalable and adaptable to different environments.

  2. Accessibility and User Interface: IBM SKLM has a user-friendly web-based interface, allowing authorized users to easily manage encryption keys, policies, and access controls. In contrast, Vault offers a command-line interface (CLI) and an API-driven approach, catering to developers and advanced users who prefer scripting and automation.

  3. Key Management Features: IBM SKLM provides robust key management capabilities, including key generation, rotation, and archival, as well as comprehensive auditing and reporting features. Vault, on the other hand, focuses on secret management and provides features like dynamic secrets, secure secret storage, and automatic revocation.

  4. Security and Compliance: IBM SKLM employs FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified hardware security modules (HSMs) for secure key storage and cryptographic operations. It also supports integration with existing enterprise security infrastructure, enforcing strong access controls and meeting compliance requirements. Vault, while also providing similar security measures with HSM integration, places emphasis on secret encryption and advanced access control policies.

  5. Community and Support: IBM SKLM benefits from IBM's established presence in the enterprise market, offering extensive support, documentation, and training resources. Vault, being an open-source project, has a vibrant community of contributors, providing support through forums, GitHub repositories, and online discussions.

  6. Licensing and Cost: IBM SKLM is a commercial product that requires licensing, and the cost may vary depending on the organization's specific requirements and deployment size. Vault, being open-source, is free to use and can significantly reduce the cost of key management for organizations that do not require enterprise-grade support.

In summary, IBM SKLM provides seamless integration, a user-friendly interface, and comprehensive key management features, while Vault offers flexibility, a focus on secret management, and a cost-effective solution for organizations with diverse needs.

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Detailed Comparison

Vault
Vault
IBM SKLM
IBM SKLM

Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

It centralizes, simplifies and automates the encryption key management process to help minimize risk and reduce operational costs of encryption key management. It offers secure, robust key storage, key serving and key lifecycle management for IBM and non-IBM storage solutions using the OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP).

Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.;Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.;Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.;Leasing and Renewal: All secrets in Vault have a lease associated with it. At the end of the lease, Vault will automatically revoke that secret. Clients are able to renew leases via built-in renew APIs.;Revocation: Vault has built-in support for secret revocation. Vault can revoke not only single secrets, but a tree of secrets, for example all secrets read by a specific user, or all secrets of a particular type. Revocation assists in key rolling as well as locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.
Centralized, transparent key management; Offers simple, secure integration between data-at-rest storage systems and IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager with the industry-standard KMIP protocol; Reduces key management costs by automating the assignment and rotation of keys
Statistics
GitHub Stars
33.4K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
4.5K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
816
Stacks
2
Followers
802
Followers
4
Votes
71
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 17
    Secure
  • 13
    Variety of Secret Backends
  • 11
    Very easy to set up and use
  • 8
    Dynamic secret generation
  • 5
    AuditLog
Pros
  • 1
    Supported on any cloud (IBM, Amazon, Azure)
  • 1
    KMIP-compliant
  • 1
    Supports wide range of devices and applications
  • 1
    Supported on Windows, Linux, AIX
  • 1
    Easy to use

What are some alternatives to Vault, IBM SKLM?

Doppler

Doppler

Doppler’s developer-first security platform empowers teams to seamlessly manage, orchestrate, and govern secrets at scale.

Docker Secrets

Docker Secrets

A container native solution that strengthens the Trusted Delivery component of container security by integrating secret distribution directly into the container platform.

AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.

EnvKey

EnvKey

Securely store config and manage access in an end-to-end encrypted, auto-syncing desktop app. Connect your apps in minutes in any language with an environment variable and a line or two of code.

Knox-app

Knox-app

Knox is a SaaS (Secrets as a Service) that helps you manage your keys, secrets, and configurations. Start in minutes and close the widest security breach. You cannot keep storing secrets in your git repo or sharing them by email or slack me

Keywhiz

Keywhiz

Keywhiz is a secret management and distribution service that is now available for everyone. Keywhiz helps us with infrastructure secrets, including TLS certificates and keys, GPG keyrings, symmetric keys, database credentials, API tokens, and SSH keys for external services — and even some non-secrets like TLS trust stores. Automation with Keywhiz allows us to seamlessly distribute and generate the necessary secrets for our services, which provides a consistent and secure environment, and ultimately helps us ship faster.

Infisical

Infisical

It is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) secret manager that enables teams to easily manage and sync their environment variables.

Torus CLI

Torus CLI

Torus simplifies the modern development workflow enabling you to store, share, and organize secrets across services and environments. With Torus, you can standardize on one tool across all environments. Map Torus to your workflows using projects, environments, services, teams, and machines.

Confidant

Confidant

Confidant is a open source secret management service that provides user-friendly storage and access to secrets in a secure way, from the developers at Lyft.

Keeper Secrets Manager

Keeper Secrets Manager

It is a fully managed cloud-based, zero-knowledge platform for securing infrastructure secrets such as API keys, database passwords, access keys, certificates and any type of confidential data.

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