Article

Azure Key Vault or IBM Vault? For your customers, the answer is "and"

04/11/2026

Partners who discuss secrets management with Azure customers often hear the same thing: "We already have Key Vault."

It's a fair response. After all, Azure delivers the scale, flexibility and rich set of native security tools that customers need and rely on. But as Azure estates grow across applications, teams and hybrid environments, secrets tend to multiply faster than the processes designed to manage them. Privileged accounts are involved in nearly 40% of data breaches, and hard-coded credentials, manual rotation and fragmented visibility leave exactly the kind of gaps attackers look for.

This is where IBM Vault comes in. It doesn't ask customers to abandon what they have – it extends it.

Complement, not replace

Rather than competing with Azure's native tools, IBM Vault gives customers a single, auditable control layer on top.

A centralised, identity-based secrets management and encryption platform, IBM Vault integrates with Azure services and identity systems, including Managed Identities, and adds the things customers often find they're missing consistent governance across applications and environments, dynamic credentials in place of static ones, and the same workflows across hybrid and multicloud.

Three ways IBM Vault strengthens Azure environments

#1 Protect and govern sensitive secrets: A secure system of record for secrets, certificates and keys, centralising lifecycle management and enforcing consistent governance.

#2 Identify and eliminate credential risk: Uncovering unsecured credentials across code repositories and collaboration tools and replacing them with dynamic, tightly controlled secrets, reducing exposure and manual effort.

#3 Secure trusted access across identities: Connecting machines, users and services through identity-based authentication, enabling least-privilege access and consistent zero trust enforcement across cloud and hybrid.

Where IBM Vault has already been used

IBM Vault is backed by real use-cases where it’s brought about genuine results for the businesses it’s been implemented in:

ManTech saved the equivalent of more than 400 employee hours a year by automating credential management and used IBM Vault with Terraform and Boundary to move security setup and delivery from several months to two to three weeks.¹

Canva reduced secret provisioning processes by 87.5% and gained full ownership visibility across its secrets.²

Duke Energy's journey from on premises to the cloud, and the developer platform it built to scale security and accelerate delivery, is a useful reference for customers running hybrid estates.³

Looking ahead to secure AI on Azure

Azure customers are increasingly building with AI, and autonomous agents bring new identity and access questions. Security that checks a request once is not enough when an agent is acting at runtime. IBM's continuous trust approach, which enforces identity, access and control as the agent works, gives partners a forward-looking reason to start the conversation now.

Why Arrow for IBM Vault?

As an authorised and experienced IBM distributor, Arrow ECS helps partners build a profitable IBM practice. Our dedicated IBM team provides sales and technical enablement to help you take IBM Vault to market with confidence.

Through Arrow's Experience Centre, Technical Solution Engineers can support demonstrations and custom Proofs of Concept, so your customers can see how IBM Vault works alongside their Azure environment before any commitment is made. We also offer IBM funding, bespoke marketing activities and flexible payment solutions to keep CapEx low, with our five-step IBM Growth Framework providing a clear path from strategy to growth.

Azure customers already have strong foundations. IBM Vault helps them secure those foundations at scale, and with Arrow behind you, you have everything you need to make that a compelling and repeatable offer.

To find out more about how Arrow can support your IBM Vault practice, get in touch with our IBM team.