HashiCorp Vault vs Databunker Pro — PII Storage & Compliance

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Vault is for infrastructure secrets, not personal data

• Data subject access requests — a user asks “what data do you have on me?” Vault has no concept of a user profile or a way to retrieve all data belonging to one person.
• Right to erasure — deleting all PII for one user across your system. In Vault, you’d have to track every secret path where you stored each user’s data and delete them individually.
• Consent and legal basis tracking — GDPR and DPDP Act require you to record why you’re processing each person’s data. Vault has no consent model.
• Data minimization — storing only what’s necessary, with automatic expiration. Vault secrets can have TTLs, but there’s no concept of user record lifecycle management.
• Audit for compliance — Vault logs access events, but not in a format an auditor or DPO can use to demonstrate privacy compliance.

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What Databunker Pro gives you that Vault doesn’t

• User-centric data model — store complete user profiles as JSON, look them up by email, phone, login, or token
• Format-preserving tokenization — Luhn-valid credit card tokens, integer tokens, timestamp tokens — not just opaque UUIDs
• Consent management — track legal basis, user agreements, and processing operations for GDPR/DPDP Act
• DPO portal — built-in interface for Data Protection Officers to handle access, erasure, and portability requests
• Record versioning — full version history for every user record, not just current state
• Auto-expiration — sliding and absolute TTLs for automatic data deletion (data minimization by design)
• Fuzzy search — search encrypted PII records without decrypting the database
• Multi-tenancy — native row-level isolation in PostgreSQL, not namespace-based separation
• Simple API — one call to store a user, one call to retrieve, one call to delete. No policy authoring, no mount configuration, no unseal ceremony
• Audit trail — every API call logged with encrypted PII context, ready for compliance review

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Comparison table

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Code examples

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Storing a user profile in Vault (the workaround)

# Store user PII as a KV secret — you manage the path structure
vault kv put secret/users/john@example.com \
  first="John" \
  last="Doe" \
  phone="+1-555-123-4567" \
  ssn="123-45-6789" \
  address="123 Main St"

# Retrieve — you need to know the exact path
vault kv get secret/users/john@example.com

# Delete for GDPR erasure — hope you tracked every path
vault kv delete secret/users/john@example.com
# But what about secret/cards/john@example.com?
# And secret/consents/john@example.com?
# And secret/sessions/john@example.com?

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Storing a user profile in Databunker Pro (purpose-built)

const axios = require('axios');

// 1. Store a complete user profile — one API call
const response = await axios.post('https://your-databunker/v2/UserCreate', {
  profile: {
    email: 'john@example.com',
    first: 'John',
    last: 'Doe',
    phone: '+1-555-123-4567',
    ssn: '123-45-6789',
    address: '123 Main St'
  }
}, {
  headers: { 'X-Bunker-Token': process.env.DATABUNKER_API_KEY }
});

const userToken = response.data.token;
// "a21fa1d3-5e47-11ef-a729-32e05c6f6c16"

// 2. Look up by email, phone, or token — built-in search
const user = await axios.post('https://your-databunker/v2/UserGet', {
  mode: 'email',
  identity: 'john@example.com'
}, {
  headers: { 'X-Bunker-Token': process.env.DATABUNKER_API_KEY }
});

// 3. GDPR erasure — one call deletes everything for this user
await axios.post('https://your-databunker/v2/UserDelete', {
  mode: 'token',
  identity: userToken
}, {
  headers: { 'X-Bunker-Token': process.env.DATABUNKER_API_KEY }
});

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Tokenizing credit cards

curl -X POST https://your-databunker/v2/TokenCreate \
  -H "X-Bunker-Token: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "record": "4532015112830366",
    "tokentype": "creditcard",
    "slidingtime": "30d",
    "unique": true
  }'

{
  "status": "ok",
  "tokenuuid": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
  "tokenbase": "4024007186539112"
}

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When to use each

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The bottom line

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Next steps

• Quickstart — try the API against a throwaway instance
• Master key — the key model, and how it differs from Vault’s
• Migrate a SQL users table — moving existing records in