In any industry you will probably find a number of really responsible vendors, and of course, you will find the outliers and the outlaws. It is true in the security vendor community, too. There are a core group of responsible vendors, there are those that exaggerate the capabilities of their products, and there are those who just charge as much as they can get away with. I guess that is just human nature.
When I set out 15 years ago to bring encryption and key management solutions to market, I knew that the existing Key Management Server (KMS) products were highly priced and out of reach for most companies and organizations. A KMS vendor once told me that they did not want to work with any customer who did not want to spend at least $10 Million or more on their solution! I wanted to create a KMS solution that would be in reach for the average business, non-profit, and local government agency. Everyone deserves to deploy a really good security solution to protect their employees and their customers. We’ve now passed the 10-year anniversary of the first release of our Alliance Key Manager solution, and I am proud of the price disruption we created in every part of the KMS market – on-premise HSMs, VMware software appliances, and in the cloud (AWS, Azure).
I had a real shock this last week. Maybe things have not changed as much as I thought.
A prospective customer sent me a price quote from one of the mainstream KMS vendors. Their company wanted to purchase two key manager HSMs to protect 12 SQL Server databases. Look at how this was priced (numbers rounded):
Two key management HSMs: $ 90,000
Annual software support for the HSMs: $ 16,000
12 Endpoint licenses for SQL Server $ 73,000
Annual software support for the endpoints: $ 15,000
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Total: $ 194,000
Unbelievable !!!
This company was going to pay $106,000 for two key managers, and THEN pay for each database that had to be encrypted. There is no reason on Planet Earth why this customer should have to pay so much to protect a small number of databases. I feel sorry for them if they have other databases they need to protect as they will have to pay for each of those, too. It is not hard to see how this cost would rapidly escalate as the company worked to protect more data - and it is clear that the average small business or organization could never afford this solution.
Let me show you how we would price our solution for the same requirement:
Two key management HSMs: $ 30,000
Annual software support and maintenance: $ 6,000
12 Endpoint licenses for SQL Server $ 0
Annual software support and maintenance: $ 0
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Total: $ 36,000
That’s right. For the same solution we would save this customer $158,000 out of the starting gate. Further, we would save them even more as they deployed encryption over additional databases - and the software maintenance costs would escalate, too. How can we save you this much? Easy, we ask a fair price for our key management solution, and we don’t charge you at all for each database or application. If you purchase a key manager, we want you to use it for every security project you have. You don’t need to keep dredging up money each time you want to use the key management solution. With our pricing policy, it would be easy to envision saving this customer several MILLION dollars in KMS costs over a period of a few years!!!
Can you think of something you could spend that money on? Raises, new hires, new technology, business investment, and so much more. I am sure you can think of something useful to do with those funds. This kind of cost can drag a company down and reduce its competitiveness. This is outrageous.
You are not trapped and you have choices. Just talk to us.
In addition to being affordable, we make it easy to evaluate our Alliance Key Manager solution. You can now download it from our website, get access to documentation and quick start guides, and get access to full technical support.
You have options, just talk to us.
Patrick
