IBM Aspera on Cloud vs OpenStack Barbican
IBM Aspera on Cloud
ibm.comOpenStack Barbican
docs.openstack.orgSide by side
| Figure | IBM Aspera on Cloud | OpenStack Barbican |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1.07/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 1 |
| Spec score · Cloud Computing platform | 8.1 (#4) | 7.4 (#9) |
| Spec score · Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (Cloud IaaS) Software | 8.1 (#7) | 7.3 (#12) |
| Purpose | Aspera on Cloud is IBM's on-demand SaaS service for securely and reliably moving large files and data sets across on-premises and multi-cloud environments. | Barbican is the OpenStack Key Manager service for secure storage, provisioning, and management of secrets such as keys, certificates, passwords, and raw binary data. |
Plans
IBM Aspera on Cloud
- Free 14-day trialPriced on request
- Pay As You Go$1.07 a month
- Essentials Edition$22.10 a month
- Standard Plus$660 a month
- Free 14-day trialFree
- Lite$11,916 a year
In their own words
IBM Aspera on Cloud
IBM Aspera on Cloud has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
OpenStack Barbican
OpenStack Barbican is the OpenStack Key Manager service for storing, provisioning, and managing secrets such as keys, certificates, passwords, and raw binary data. Its barbican-api component provides an OpenStack-native REST API for managing secrets; barbican-worker and barbican-keystone-listener are also part of the service. The listener manages Barbican’s database records for Keystone projects when those projects are deleted. A plugin architecture lets operators connect software secret stores or hardware such as HSMs. Documented options include KMIP, Dogtag, and Vault secret-store plugins, as well as PKCS#11 crypto plugins. With PKCS#11, master encryption and HMAC keys can reside in an HSM. Operators can develop plugins for storage, generation, and event handling, though support status may be stable, experimental, or out-of-tree. The default Simple Crypto plugin stores its single encryption key in plaintext in barbican.conf, so service-node access must be restricted carefully. Container ACL settings do not carry over to associated secrets, and ACL functionality requires Keystone integration. Barbican is free under Apache 2.0; installation guidance assumes a working OpenStack deployment.