A Fortune 10 technology company had added a feature to its cloud platform that creates and assigns encryption keys automatically as customers provision resources, applying the provider's security best practices without any pre-planning. The feature addressed a real pain. Customers who want to own the keys that protect their data at rest must enable customer-managed keys across dozens of cloud services, and rotations and assignments remain clumsy and error-prone. The product team wanted to understand how enterprise buyers would judge it.
The team wanted to know whether customers understood the control they retained, whether that control matched their expectations, whether the concept sounded too good to be true, which regulations and policies shaped key management decisions, and where cost stood as a barrier. Its engineers planned to build the next release on what the study found.
PP&A designed a voice-of-customer study around seven in-depth interviews, completed in June and July 2025, with security and infrastructure leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom: chief information security officers, directors of cybersecurity operations and architecture, heads of IT and cyber risk, IT operations leaders, a former alliances executive at a security vendor and an independent DevOps consultant, across banking, retail, life sciences, industrial equipment and data services.
The interview guide covered current key management practices and the drivers of key ownership, awareness and perception of automated key provisioning, the operational benefits buyers value, adoption barriers and trust, and the influence of regional regulation, with Europe as a specific probe. The team also asked each interviewee to compare the client's key management stack with the largest competing cloud. PP&A synthesized the interviews into a report structured as an encryption trade-off matrix, a deep dive on customer-managed keys, a competitive comparison, an assessment of the automated feature and a set of strategic implications.
The client received a report that placed the automated feature in the context of how enterprises manage encryption keys. It set out the trade-offs between provider-managed and customer-managed keys, the operational burden that key ownership carries, and how regulation and data sovereignty shape those choices, with Europe as a specific focus. It compared the client's key management stack with the largest competing cloud and assessed which buyers and workloads the automated feature suits. It closed with strategic implications for the product and its positioning.
The study gave the product team an outside view of how security leaders judge the concept, grounded in their current practice. It also gave the engineers a basis for positioning the feature and planning its next release.
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