Now You Can Use AWS Secrets Manager to Help Maintain HIPAA Compliance in the AWS Cloud

Posted on: Jun 4, 2018

You can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets for applications that are subject to U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance requirements. With this launch, AWS has made it easier for you to use the secure AWS environment to process, maintain, and store protected health information that is subject to HIPAA.

AWS Secrets Manager is a secrets management service that helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources. This service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. Users and applications retrieve secrets with a call to Secrets Manager APIs, eliminating the need to hardcode sensitive information in plain text. Secrets Manager offers secret rotation with built-in integration for Amazon RDS for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon Aurora. Also, the service is extensible to other types of secrets, including API keys and OAuth tokens. In addition, Secrets Manager enables you to control access to secrets using fine-grained permissions and audit secret rotation centrally for resources in the AWS Cloud, third-party services, and on-premises.

Security, including HIPAA compliance, is a shared responsibility between AWS and you. For example, it is your responsibility to configure AWS Secrets Manager to rotate secrets to meet HIPAA requirements. To learn more about the actions you may need to take to meet HIPAA compliance requirements, read the Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services whitepaper, and see the AWS Cloud Compliance and HIPAA Compliance webpages. For a comprehensive list of access-controlled documents relevant to compliance and security in the AWS Cloud, see AWS Artifact.

To learn more about Secrets Manager, visit the documentation or read our blogs on Store, Distribute, and Rotate Credentials Securely and Rotate Amazon RDS database credentials automatically with Secrets Manager. To get started, visit the Secrets Manager home page.