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How to choose the right Azure key management solution

Azure offers several solutions for cryptographic key storage and management in the cloud: Azure Key Vault (standard and premium offerings), Azure Key Vault Managed HSM, Azure Cloud HSM, and Azure Payment HSM. This article helps you choose the right solution based on your scenarios, requirements, and industry.

For an overview of key management concepts and detailed descriptions of each solution, see Key management in Azure.

To narrow down a key management solution, follow the flowchart based on common high-level requirements and key management scenarios. Alternatively, use the table based on specific customer requirements that follows it. If either provides multiple products as solutions, or if you want reassurance about choosing the right product, use a combination of the flowchart and table to make a final decision. If you're curious about what other customers in the same industry use, read the table of common key management solutions by industry segment.

Choose an Azure key management solution by scenario

The following chart describes common requirements and use case scenarios and the recommended Azure key management solution.

The chart refers to these common requirements:

  • FIPS-140 is a US government standard with different levels of security requirements. For more information, see Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140.
  • Key sovereignty is when the customer's organization has full and exclusive control of their keys, including control over what users and services can access the keys and key management policies.
  • Single tenancy refers to a single dedicated instance of an application deployed for each customer, rather than a shared instance among multiple customers. The need for single tenant products is often found as an internal compliance requirement in financial service industries.

It also refers to these various key management use cases:

  • Encryption at rest is typically enabled for Azure IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models. Applications such as Microsoft 365; Microsoft Purview Information Protection; platform services in which the cloud is used for storage, analytics, and service bus functionality; and infrastructure services in which operating systems and applications are hosted and deployed in the cloud use encryption at rest. Customer managed keys for encryption at rest is used with Azure Storage and Microsoft Entra. For highest security, keys should be HSM-backed, 3k or 4k RSA keys. For more information about encryption at rest, see Azure Data Encryption at Rest.
  • SSL/TLS Offload is supported on Azure Key Vault Managed HSM and Azure Cloud HSM. Customers have improved high availability, security, and the best price point on Azure Key Vault Managed HSM for F5 and Nginx.
  • Lift and shift refer to scenarios where a PKCS11 application on-premises is migrated to Azure Virtual Machines and running software such as Oracle TDE in Azure Virtual Machines. Lift and shift requiring payment PIN processing is supported by Azure Payment HSM. All other scenarios are supported by Azure Cloud HSM. Full native PKCS#11, JCA/JCE, and CNG/KSP support is only available with Azure Cloud HSM. Azure Key Vault Managed HSM offers limited PKCS#11 support for TLS offload scenarios with F5 and Nginx.
  • Payment PIN processing includes allowing card and mobile payment authorization and 3D-Secure authentication; PIN generation, management, and validation; payment credential issuing for cards, wearables, and connected devices; securing keys and authentication data; and sensitive data protection for point-to-point encryption, security tokenization, and EMV payment tokenization. This also includes certifications such as PCI DSS, PCI 3DS, and PCI PIN. These are only supported by Azure Payment HSM.

Flow chart diagram that shows how to choose the right key management product based on requirements and scenarios.

The flowchart result is a starting point to identify the solution that best matches your needs.

Compare key management solutions

Azure provides multiple key management solutions to allow customers to choose a product based on both high-level requirements and management responsibilities.

Provisioning and hosting are managed by Microsoft across all solutions. Key generation and management, roles and permissions granting, and monitoring and auditing are the responsibility of the customer across all solutions.

Service characteristics and responsibilities

Use the following table to compare how each service works and who manages what. This trade-off of management responsibility ranges from Azure Key Vault having the least customer responsibility to Azure Payment HSM having the most.

AKV Standard AKV Premium Azure Key Vault Managed HSM Azure Cloud HSM Azure Payment HSM
Service model PaaS PaaS PaaS IaaS-style HSM service IaaS-style HSM service
Authentication Entra ID Entra ID Entra ID HSM authentication (password) HSM authentication (password)
HSM administrative control Microsoft Microsoft Customer Customer Customer
Patching and maintenance Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Customer
Service health and hardware failover Microsoft Microsoft Shared Shared Customer
Business continuity (within-region) Automatic Automatic Automatic Automatic Customer
Disaster recovery (cross-region) Automatic Automatic Manual Manual Manual
Backup and restore Built-in service backup Built-in service backup Service-managed Manual HSM backup Manual HSM backup

Decision criteria

Use the following table to compare all the solutions side by side. Answer each question to help identify the solution that meets your requirements.

AKV Standard AKV Premium Azure Key Vault Managed HSM Azure Cloud HSM Azure Payment HSM
What level of compliance do you need? FIPS 140-2 level 1 FIPS 140-3 level 3† FIPS 140-3 level 3, PCI DSS, PCI 3DS FIPS 140-3 level 3 FIPS 140-2 level 3, PCI HSM v3, PCI PTS HSM v3, PCI DSS, PCI 3DS, PCI PIN
Do you need key sovereignty? No No Yes Yes Yes
Do you need single tenancy? No No Yes Yes Yes
What are your use cases? Encryption at Rest, CMK, custom Encryption at Rest, CMK, custom Encryption at Rest, TLS Offload, CMK, custom Lift and shift, PKCS#11, TLS Offload, TDE, code signing Payment PIN processes, custom
Do you need HSM hardware protection? No Yes Yes Yes Yes
What kind of objects do you need to store? Asym Keys, Secrets, Certs Asym Keys, Secrets, Certs Asym/Sym Keys only‡ Asym/Sym Keys, Certs Keys
Do you need dedicated capacity? No No Yes Yes Yes
Do you need customer control of root of trust? No No Yes Yes Yes
What is your budget? $ $$ $$$ $$$ $$$$

Common key management solution uses by industry segments

Here is a list of the key management solutions we commonly see being utilized based on industry.

Industry Suggested Azure solution Considerations for suggested solutions
I am an enterprise or an organization with strict security and compliance requirements (ex: banking, government, highly regulated industries). Azure Key Vault Managed HSM Azure Key Vault Managed HSM provides FIPS 140-3 Level 3 compliance, and it is a PCI compliant solution for ecommerce. It supports encryption for PCI DSS 4.0. It provides HSM backed keys and gives customers key sovereignty and single tenancy.
I am a direct-to-consumer ecommerce merchant who needs to store, process, and transmit my customers' credit cards to my external payment processor/gateway and looking for a PCI compliant solution. Azure Key Vault Managed HSM Azure Key Vault Managed HSM provides FIPS 140-3 Level 3 compliance, and it is a PCI compliant solution for ecommerce. It supports encryption for PCI DSS 4.0. It provides HSM backed keys and gives customers key sovereignty and single tenancy.
I am a service provider for financial services, an issuer, a card acquirer, a card network, a payment gateway/PSP, or 3DS solution provider looking for a single tenant service that can meet PCI and multiple major compliance frameworks. Azure Payment HSM Azure Payment HSM provides FIPS 140-2 Level 3, PCI HSM v3, PCI DSS, PCI 3DS, and PCI PIN compliance. It provides key sovereignty and single tenancy, common internal compliance requirements around payment processing. Azure Payment HSM provides full payment transaction and PIN processing support.
I am an early-stage startup customer looking to prototype a cloud-native application. Azure Key Vault Standard Azure Key Vault Standard provides software-backed keys at an economy price.
I am a startup customer looking to produce a cloud-native application. Azure Key Vault Premium, Azure Key Vault Managed HSM Both Azure Key Vault Premium and Azure Key Vault Managed HSM provide HSM-backed keys* and are the best solutions for building cloud native applications.
I am an IaaS customer wanting to move my application to use Azure VM/HSMs. Azure Cloud HSM Azure Cloud HSM is designed specifically for IaaS scenarios and provides FIPS 140-3 Level 3 compliance with key sovereignty and single tenancy. It's ideal for lift-and-shift migrations requiring PKCS#11 support, such as migrating from on-premises HSMs, Azure Dedicated HSM, or AWS CloudHSM. Azure Cloud HSM doesn't integrate with Azure PaaS/SaaS services; for those scenarios, use Azure Key Vault Managed HSM instead.

Note

* Azure Key Vault Premium allows the creation of both software-protected and HSM-protected keys. If using Azure Key Vault Premium, verify that the key created is HSM-protected.

† Azure Key Vault Premium keys created on HSM Platform 2 are FIPS 140-3 Level 3. Keys created on the older HSM Platform 1 are FIPS 140-2 Level 2. For details, see About keys.

‡ Azure Key Vault Managed HSM stores cryptographic keys only. Unlike Key Vault vaults, it doesn't support secrets or certificates.

For detailed information about each Azure key management solution, including technical specifications and use cases, see Key management in Azure.

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