AWS GovCloud (US) Update – AWS Key Management Service Now Available

The AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) provides you with seamless, centralized control over your encryption keys. As I noted when we launched the service (see my post, New AWS Key Management Service, for more information), this service gives you a new option for data protection and relieves you of many of the more onerous scalability and availability issues that inevitably surface when you implement key management at enterprise scale. KMS uses Hardware Security Modules to protect the security of your keys. It is also integrated with AWS CloudTrail for centralized logging of all key usage.

AWS GovCloud (US), as you probably know, is an AWS region designed to allow U.S. government agencies (federal, state, and local), along with contractors, educational institutions, enterprises, and other U.S. customers to run regulated workloads in the cloud. AWS includes many security features and is also subject to many compliance programs. AWS GovCloud (US) allows customers to run workloads that are subject to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP^sm), and levels 1-5 of the Department of Defense Cloud Security Model (CSM).

KMS in GovCloud (US)
Today we are making AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) available in AWS GovCloud (US).  You can use it to encrypt data in your own applications and within the following AWS services, all using keys that are under your control:

• Amazon EBS volumes.
• Amazon S3 objects using Server-Side Encryption (SSE-KMS) or client-side encryption using the encryption client in the AWS SDKs.
• Output from Amazon EMR clusters to S3 using the EMRFS client.

To learn more, visit the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) page. To get started in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, contact us today!

— Jeff;