DSM Explorer – A “Free-Tier” SaaS Edition of the Industry

Shashi Kiran Fortanix
Shashi Kiran
Published:Nov 7, 2022
Reading Time:4 Minutes
DSM Explorer

Fortanix has gained significant traction with the enterprise customer base globally, across several verticals, where securing sensitive data, ensuring privacy and compliance is top of mind. Even as the engagement with mid-to-large enterprises continues to increase, we also see that solving this problem is equally relevant for smaller companies that are also bound by similar compliance and privacy requirements.

In recent years, we instituted a 30-day free trial exposing the full-set of capabilities of our flagship enterprise-tier DSM SaaS offering that provided a great way for large enterprises to get an immersive experience on this feature-rich platform. We see several companies signing up for these trials on a weekly basis and the 30-day trial offer will continue to be available via our website.

At the same time, we realized that enterprises with selective use-cases, or smaller companies could benefit from a different engagement approach - one that was more amenable to use-cases that didn’t require the “whole enchilada”, and where the clock would not stop at the end of a 30-day period.

We felt that this approach should also appeal to practitioners used to self-service models that didn’t require lengthy alignment, resource allocation, budget approvals and decision-making cycles within their teams.

Bearing these in mind, we are thrilled to announce the Fortanix DSM Explorer SaaS “Free-Tier” edition. Authorized users can choose the offering most relevant for them and get started right here.

DSM explorer pricing

The Explorer tier has five curated solutions to begin with, focused on popular use-cases, including some with our public cloud provider partners AWS and Google, like external key management (EKM) and Bring your own key (BYOK) capabilities. Tokenization is yet another popular use-case. All plans are backed by Fortanix FIPS 140-2 Level 3 Hardware Security Modules (HSMs)

A brief description of each of these options is below -

Services Offer

Description

Tokenization
Tokenization Icon
Secure sensitive data such as Personal Identifiable Information (PII) with random strings of characters known as “token”. Tokenization helps organizations to achieve overall security standards and avoid regulatory penalties from data privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and prevent insiders from exposing customer data (accidentally or intentionally)

Service limited to one application or 10K operations per month. Click here for the datasheet

Google Cloud External Key Management
Google Cloud EKM Icon

Experience enhanced security control, authority, and manage Google cloud keys outside of the cloud and adhere to data privacy regulations like Schrems-II and GDPR.

Service limited to one application or 10K operations per month. Click here for the datasheet.

AWS KMS External Key Store​
AWS KMS External Key Store​

Experience enhanced security control, authority, and manage Google cloud keys outside of the cloud and adhere to data privacy regulations like Schrems-II and GDPR.​​

Service limited to one application or 10K operations per month. Click here for the solution brief.

Google Workspace Client-side Encryption
CSE Icon

Workspace user retains sole authority and control over the cryptographic keys for encrypting data and documents on the Google workspace.

Service limits to one key and 10 users. Click here for the solution brief.

BYOK on AWS
BYOK AWS Icon

Organizations with cloud initiatives who must demonstrate control over cryptographic key generation process to meet compliance or internal policy can retain cryptographic key control by bringing their own key to AWS.

Service limited to one cloud account or connection. Click here for the datasheet

BYOK on Microsoft Azure
BYOK Azure Icon

Organizations with cloud initiatives who must demonstrate control over cryptographic key generation process to meet compliance or internal policy can retain cryptographic key control by bringing their own key to Azure

Service limited to one cloud account or connection. Click here for the solution brief.

Needless to say, in the coming months, Fortanix will continue to expand the “Explorer” tier to include additional offerings. Meanwhile,

Who is the “Explorer” tier for?

  • Existing customers that would like to explore Fortanix for new use-cases in production environments (Example: tokenization), i.e., not a trial version.
  • New users that would like to prove the value for key security and compliance-centric use-cases without lengthy corporate approvals or budgeting processes.
  • Partners that want to showcase value for their prospects taking “real-world” use cases into account.
  • Practitioners that want a “safe sandbox” to try out real-world use-cases and validate them in a controlled setting.

We expect this to benefit businesses in at least three ways -

  1. Reduce Engagement and Deployment Friction - Encourage users in organizations (regardless of size) to leverage the “Explorer” packaging for one of the many compliance-centric use-cases via self-service workflows with no formal commitment or budget requirement.
  2. Accelerate Cloud-Adoption – We recognize that several organizations are still early in their journey to the cloud, and these offerings enable them to gain confidence, build expertise and prove value via smaller undertakings before moving on to more ambitious undertakings with the Enterprise-Tier. An added benefit is the ability to own/manage keys in a multi-cloud environment.
  3. Serve as the “Easy Button” for security and compliance – Smaller companies don’t have an army of people to manage data security, or compliance, but yet are similar standards. A packaged solution that allows them to quickly get these new solutions going knowing they meet the compliance standards like CCPA, GDPR and Shrems-II, significantly reducing business risk.

The Explorer-Tier comes with several sophisticated capabilities including advanced access controls, quorum approvals and can support additional use-cases over a period of time.

Backed by Fortanix Support

Though this is a Free-Tier it is still backed by Fortanix support, with access to raising trouble tickets and getting updates and fixes.

Seamless pathway to Enterprise Scale

More important, once a user is able to prove value against a particular use-case, say Tokenization and would like to derive benefits from the broader DSM SaaS platform including broader set of features, performance or scale, it is very easy to move to the Enterprise-Tier, by purchasing credits for that tier.

Just contact us when you’re ready.

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