Enterprise key management

There’s a new report, Enterprise Key Management Systems, from the Burton Group. Many vendors talk a lot about key management, but this report seems to show that many of them don’t really have much of an interest in it beyond what’s needed to make their own products work. This report lists 10 areas that use key management: file encryption, laptop encryption, email encryption, etc. For 13 vendors, including Voltage, RSA/EMC, nCipher, NetApp, SafeNet and eight others, it lists which vendors have an offering in each area.

Voltage has more offerings than any other vendor, having something in seven of the 10 areas. RSA/EMC is a close second, offering something in six of the 10. Three more, nCipher, NetApp and SafeNet offer something in five of the 10.

The top five enterprise key management vendors all have an offering in at least half of the 10 areas, and seem to be ones that are fairly serious about enterprise key management. Their offerings overlap in some, but not all, areas, which makes it looks like the five leaders aren't really direct competitors in most cases. There's some overlap between the areas that Voltage covers and the ones that RSA/EMC covers, for example, but not enough to really say that the two companies are really competitors.

The other eight vendors seem to be more niche players, and don’t seem to have an interest in developing solutions tthat address he broader enterprise key management problem. They seem content to just manage keys that their applications need.