Google Cloud Key Management vs. Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities

Use for most types of cloud SQL services. Excellent modern-day encryption technologies. If a customer wants to manage their keys then Google Cloud Platform is well suited for those people if it matters. Able to divide workloads and pipelines. Customer managed encryption keys support for Data fusion, Data Proc, Cloud SQL, and GKE. We use Cloud EKM: key use operations $0.03 per 10,000 operations for our day to day operations.

Incentivized

Venafi allows an engineer to automate the full provisioning process not only installing the certificate to multiple applications but also configuring specific requirements for that application.

Incentivized

• Option for Customer-Managed Encryption keys for Cloud which very [few] providers do.
• Option to enhance security via Hardware Security Modules.
• Easy control panel and CLI.
• Unified commands to approve or deny key requests.

Incentivized

• Digital Certificate Inventory Management and Monitoring
• Digital Certificate Lifecycle Processes to include ownership and roles and responsibilities
• Easy automation integration into many common products
• Certificate Trust Store Management

Incentivized

• They removed the option for RSA128 bit security so yeah if it matters it a bummer.
• Pipelines are limited and very [few] for the amount you pay.
• General usability and Rapid CI/CD.

Incentivized

• The Venafi platform is constantly evolving through its upgrades which occur every quarter to meet client's specific needs. This is an outstanding model however the documentation that follows the upgrades could be more thorough.

Incentivized

The UI / UX, first of all, is night and day difference. The main attraction after the services were this: It's user friendly. It welcomes new users and properly guides them on what to do and what you can expect. Honestly, I had a very bad experience with Microsoft Azure in 2018, so I think the Google Cloud Key Management service is best for me for now and I may give the new Azure a try later.

Incentivized

Each public certificate provider has their own flavor of certificate automation, but they are not that flexible and only work with their own products. Certified Security Solutions CMS is a lightweight tool that directly competes with Venafi, but is not nearly as robust or feature risk. This is a straight forward management solution that is best fitted for the smaller companies.

Incentivized

• There is no Return of investment in our operations as we use it for KMS.
• The only ROI is that we have a piece of mind while our data is handled by Google.
• Our main objective is being fulfilled and the staff as well as customer are happy.
• Value for money.

Incentivized

• An outage is a very devastating event to any large corporation and can cost millions. Venafi's ability to prevent these outages has proven to be a great return on investment for our environment and has helped protect the bottom line.
• Venafi automates certificate installation with an included feature to schedule the install in advance. This is a great benefit of the tool because it eliminates human error and prevents any forgotten or overlooked certificates to be renewed. After installation Venafi will also validate the certificate to confirm that it has been installed properly. This shows just how thorough this tool really is.
• Security compliance is of the utmost importance in a large organization for auditing purposes and certificate security policies but at times can prove to be difficult to enforce. Venafi has proven to play a pivotal role in enforcing these policies in our environment.

Incentivized