When comparing Box Enterprise Key Management vs Ansible Vault, the Slant community recommends Ansible Vault for most people. In the question“What are the best shared secret managers?” Ansible Vault is ranked 1st while Box Enterprise Key Management is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Ansible Vault is:
The official documentation of Ansible vault does a great job at explaining how Ansible Vault works and how to use the easy UI for encrypting, decrypting, and re-keying your secrets for storing in source control.
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Pros
Pro Box provides cloud services with enterprise maintaining control over encryption keys
Box provides dedicated hardware (HSMs) that the enterprise has complete control over and can provide access to Box in a granular way with Box in turn providing cloud services such as deduplication, search indexing, information rights management, etc.
Pro The documentation does a good job on explaining how to use it
The official documentation of Ansible vault does a great job at explaining how Ansible Vault works and how to use the easy UI for encrypting, decrypting, and re-keying your secrets for storing in source control.
Pro Allows keeping encrypted data in ansible playbooks easily
Ansible uses configuration files called playbooks which are used to describe a policy that the remote system needs to follow. Though there is often a need to keep data from these configurations files encrypted when using source control.
Doing this in Ansible's Vault is pretty easy, simply running: ansible-playbook site.yml --ask-vault-pass
will run a playbook which uses encrypted data.
Cons
Con Costs more than the standard Box service
Box EKM is built as a complementary but still separate service than the storage service that Box provides. As such, it costs extra to use EKM to store secrets of data hosted with Box's cloud hosting.
Con No way of exposing just the key in the key-value pair
Ansible vault files are encrypted YAML key-value stores. The entire file is encrypted, and so it's impossible to indicate which keys are defined within the vault without also viewing values.