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Thales Offers SaaS-Based Key Management Across AWS, Azure
Cybersecurity firm Thales last week took the wraps off a service to help organizations juggle their security keys in multicloud environments.
Thales' CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager, which is a rebrand of its previous Vormetric Key Management as a Service product, gives businesses a centralized, Web-based interface to manage the encryption keys they use for their various cloud applications.
The service is designed especially for organizations working with multiple cloud providers, which -- as concerns around vendor lock-in increase -- is a lot of them. A recent Cloudify study estimated that among businesses that use the cloud, about half are partnered with more than one cloud vendor, and nearly 9 percent have at least five vendors.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of the rise of multicloud environments are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Cloudify found the AWS-Azure combo to be the most popular multicloud configuration in its study, not surprising given that these are the No. 1 and No. 2 public cloud platforms by market share, respectively.
It follows that AWS and Azure would be two of the three cloud providers that Thales supports in its CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager. The third is Salesforce.com, though Thales said in its announcement that this list is "ever-growing."
Besides providing security key lifecycle management for these platforms, the CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager also helps businesses maintain compliance "with a FIPS 140-2 and Common Criteria certified key store with visibility into how, when and by whom encryption keys are used through logging and a set of built-in usage reports," Thales said.
While the CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager is meant to be delivered a SaaS product, organizations -- particularly those in highly regulated industries -- can also choose to run it on-premises via a certified appliance.
"Organizations are struggling to manage an exploding number of encryption keys. CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager puts control in the hands of enterprises rightfully concerned about the compliance and data protection challenges inherent in multicloud environments," said Peter Galvin, head of strategy at Thales, in a statement. "The intuitive and well-designed as-a-service offering makes managing encryption keys simpler by eliminating the need to architect, purchase and deploy hardware. Through an easy to use Web interface, organizations can simply create, rotate and backup keys in a growing list of cloud providers."
More information on the CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager is available here.