StorMagic’s first SaaS offering turns the technology they recently acquired with KeyNexus into a cloud service, and the company says more SaaS offerings are on the way.

Earlier this year, hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] vendor StorMagic expanded into an adjacent security market with the  lateral move into security with the acquisition of encryption key manager provider KeyNexus. Today, they are leveraging the KeyNexus technology with a cloud services offering, Key Management as a Service [KMaaS].

“This is our first cloud service and we are entering that market,” said Bruce Kornfeld, StorMagic’s chief marketing and product officer. “We have realized that customers want to procure a lot of IT through the cloud or as a service – rather than buying software, and hardware to install it on, and maintaining it, cooling it and updating it. The SaaS market is over a hundred billion dollar market today – and StorMagic hasn’t participated in that at all.”

The as-a-service offering is exactly the same as the on-prem version, not a stripped-down or otherwise differentiated version.

“It’s the same product,” Kornfeld said. “We took all of the same hardened security features as the on-prem product, and are hosting it in the cloud and selling it as a service.”

Kornfeld also stressed that StorMagic’s Key Management as-a-Service offering is unique in the market.

“We have done our competitive research,” he said. “There’s one other company that offers it similarly to us, but our differentiation is that we support any use case. We’re a key manager for an on-prem solution, but also support their cloud applications so they can use us with Azure or any other cloud solutions they may use.”

The hyperscale cloud providers also offer similar services, but Kornfeld said StorMagic has a major advantage over them as well.

“Key management is offered as a cloud service by Azure, AWS and Google – but they are only designed to work with their own applications, and are specific to their cloud,” he stated. “Our solution can be used with any cloud.”

Kornfeld also emphasized that the StorMagic offering’s ‘Bring Your Own Key’ [BYOK] capability is innately preferably to companies like Salesforce who provide both encryption and key management.

“Using your own key management separate from encryption gives you more security – like separating a lock and key,” he said. “That’s why BYOK is growing in the industry.”

The target market for this will start with StorMagic’s existing install base, but will ultimately comprise the broad SME market.

“The market is SMEs around the world who don’t want to go through the hassle of building their own key manager,” Kornfeld said. “Larger enterprise customers would likely lean towards full-blown software that they can run themselves.”

The partners who will sell this will be traditional VAR partners – not the MSPs who are joining the new MSP program that StorMagic set up a month ago.

“The MSP program gives managed services providers and MSSPs the ability to build their own key management as-a-service, and that program is off to a very good start,” Kornfeld said. “Our MSPs wouldn’t resell this. KMaaS is for our VAR channel. The MSP program lets MSPs build their own as-a-Service offering.”

“We are really excited about this from a channel perspective,” Kornfeld added. “It  gives them another thing in their toolkit that their customers are looking for. Key management is a big problem in the industry and this makes it very easy for them to solve a problem while making some money themselves.”

While this is the first StorMagic service, Kornfeld said that it won’t be the last.

“We see this as a long term thing,” he said. “We do have a roadmap to bring out more services over time, especially on the storage side, where there are some very interesting things that our customers are looking to do. Instead of dealing with storage onsite at the edge, we can give them the option of managing some of their edge sites through the cloud, both backing up and archiving. There are all sorts of ways to minimize what they have to do at the edge. We also have more things cooking on security.”

StorMagic KMaaS is available now. Pricing for a geographically distributed multi-node , configuration starts at $575 per month.