IBM Vault

Score8.9 out of 10

26 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for IBM Vault are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Recommendations

Users have made a few common recommendations based on their experiences with Vault.

Firstly, they recommend defining roles and policies at the beginning of the setup process. This helps save time and ensures cost-effectiveness by clearly establishing access levels and permissions.

Secondly, users advise investing time in careful planning before going into production with Vault. This includes defining paths, naming conventions, and policies to streamline the implementation process and prevent potential issues.

Lastly, users emphasize the importance of exploring learning resources such as documentation, user groups, and other knowledge-sharing platforms. These resources offer valuable insights into best practices, troubleshooting tips, and real-world use cases.

Overall, users believe that while Vault is a comprehensive and powerful tool, it may require some initial effort in terms of setup and planning. They also mention that additional user features could further improve its competitiveness. However, users encourage others to research and evaluate Vault for its affordability and data security benefits, as they believe it won't disappoint.

Reviews

6 Reviews

Excellent choice for you business Secrets Management Solution

Rating: 8 out of 10

June 17, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We leverage HashiCorp Vault capabilities for storing and managing our secrets and company passwords. HashiCorp Vault integrates with applications and tools to enable transparent secure sensitive information retrieval programmatically. By leveraging HashiCorp Vault we can go with IAC/CAC on almost everything we build. HashiCorp Vault also makes it easy to share secrets between team members and the organization.

Pros

Store secrets
Store configurations
Integrate with kubernetes
Audit log of changes
Team secret sharing
Real time in transit encryption

Cons

Session Management is terrible to manage
Monitoring is hard and not enough information
User management
Configuration is too complex
More user friendly UI

Likelihood to Recommend

When you need to store secure information (secrets or configuration) for your kubernetes applications or just general secrets in a central place where team members can access. HashiCorp Vault enables granular access control and has terraform which makes it easy to manage it using IAC. It integrates really well in any cloud-native environment you are building your application.
I would not use it for small POC or companies due to the overhead of management and setup requirements. You could use another approach such as encrypted k8s secrets in git directly.

Fabricio Zubelli

DevOps Engineer in Engineering at Kea (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

HashiCorp Vault for the win!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 20, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used to manage secrets, credentials and other sensitive data among the company and our clients. It's a centralized secret management solution which mitigates security breaches and improves code development

Pros

Credentials generation
Secret management
Preventing secret sprawling

Cons

UI can improve

Likelihood to Recommend

It is a very useful tool when implemented in a company, it addresses lots of security issues, and it's very easy to implement because it is API driven.

Marco Urrea

DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at DigitalOnUs (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Vault is a flexible and safe secrets managment solution.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

September 18, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Hashicorp Vault to protect secrets used by our application teams such as database connection strings, passwords that run jobs, and meta-data about the environment around the application. This tool helps us ensure that our accounts are secure, passwords are private and our data can't be accessed by anyone that shouldn't have access to the system.

Pros

The HTTP API you use to write and read secrets is open and can be used by any application.
It keeps our sensitive data/credentials out of our GitLab repositories.
Sealing and unsealing the Vault on demand adds an additional layer of security.

Cons

Vault requires a complex setup when getting started.
Vault requires decisions around the backend type to be made up front.
Vault tokens appear to be managed manually in most cases.

Likelihood to Recommend

Vault is a reliable and resilient as the Key Management System. It is not for the novice user that does not have a background in information security. It requires a significant time investment into the different key engines that the solution offers to get started. It works very well once implemented and is very flexible in general.

Jeffrey Severance

Senior Solutions Engineer in Information Technology at Erie Insurance Group (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

HashiCorp Vault - Credentials, passwords, and any kind of secrets in your environment reliably managed.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are centralizing several config data of our application into a Vault cluster spread into different regions through AWS. It is a solution which was implemented by the DevOps team initially to support the DevOps environment, going later to all production environments. What we used to handle with config files before is maintained by HashiCorp Vault.

Pros

A great repository for credentials and secrets.
Good scalability with its own clustering solution and high availability.
Easy to install like other Hashicorp products, it is based on just one executable.

Cons

Documentation could be better.
The multiple key unseal process can be a problem if the need arises.
It would make more sense if HashiCorp Vault combined with HashiCorp Consul to create a unique product.

Likelihood to Recommend

Complex environments today are delivered in an automated manner, usually based on git repository code. From a security standpoint, credentials, passwords, and secret keys cannot be stored in these repositories. A safe and reliable environment for storing this type of data is therefore required. HashiCorp Vault has proven to be an excellent choice in the environments where I inserted it.

Erlon Sousa Pinheiro

DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at Two Hat Security (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Keeping Your Secrets a Secret with HashiCorp Vault

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 11, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HashiCorp Vault is our go-to for secrets management in our cloud implementation. Having used many other HashiCorp products, it was easy enough for us to translate that into the use of Vault. We also use it in a limited capacity with Chef, used in conjunction with encrypted data bags. HashiCorp Vault has allowed us to securely use secrets across applications without the need to expose those secrets. It has also made it easier to implement sane key rotation and achieve automation.

Pros

HashiCorp Vault manages secrets extremely well.
It works well as a cloud-agnostic or multi-cloud solution.
HashiCorp Vault works extremely well with other HashiCorp products.
Vault integrates with other systems very well because everything is API driven.

Cons

It doesn't have an interface. This isn't entirely bad because of the purpose it serves, but it does make the barrier to entry a little difficult.
Unlike many other HashiCorp products, the documentation feels like it leaves some steps out. Step by step documentation lowers the barriers to entry a little bit, and going through even the installation documentation and setup leaves a little bit of the caveats out.
It needs a fair bit of supporting infrastructure. You cannot just have a Vault instance. Having a HashiCorp Vault instance means also having a consul cluster for the backend.

Likelihood to Recommend

HashiCorp Vault, in my opinion, is a defacto standard for any cloud or automation implementation. They're the best of the best as far as products for secrets management and the ability to use it against relatively any service you have is unheard of for other products. HashiCorp has really taken out all the stops when it comes to creating a nice, extensible tool that people can use to suit their needs.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

One of a Kind

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 21, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have looked into HashiCorp Vault as a solution to generate, store, and manage secrets in a container-oriented production platform. Currently, our systems rely on Vault to store TLS certificates and credentials to stateful services in our customer-facing applications. We are also using Vault to store application-level credentials for some of our products.

Pros

Automated revocation of credentials via leases
Provides many plugins for federated authorization through different platforms
Dynamic credential generation

Cons

Documentation for the API moves slower than changes in the API itself
The database secret engine's API design isn't as elegant as it could be
No support for revocation of all secrets under one path

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe that HashiCorp Vault is a unique product for security engineers with a lot of features that can help automate the secret management tasks from end to end. For automation purposes, it does require a reasonable amount of backing infrastructure, so only consider that option if you can get a good ROI. Otherwise, it's a perfectly serviceable tool as a secret store, if you never need to stash credentials in plaintext somewhere, for example, if you're running an application that logs into another service on behalf of other clients and OAuth2 is not an option.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Keeping Your Secrets a Secret with HashiCorp Vault

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 11, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

HashiCorp Vault manages secrets extremely well.
It works well as a cloud-agnostic or multi-cloud solution.
HashiCorp Vault works extremely well with other HashiCorp products.
Vault integrates with other systems very well because everything is API driven.

Cons

It doesn't have an interface. This isn't entirely bad because of the purpose it serves, but it does make the barrier to entry a little difficult.
Unlike many other HashiCorp products, the documentation feels like it leaves some steps out. Step by step documentation lowers the barriers to entry a little bit, and going through even the installation documentation and setup leaves a little bit of the caveats out.
It needs a fair bit of supporting infrastructure. You cannot just have a Vault instance. Having a HashiCorp Vault instance means also having a consul cluster for the backend.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience