AWS Security Blog

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis Is Now a HIPAA Eligible Service and You Can Use It to Power Real-Time Healthcare Applications

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Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is now a HIPAA Eligible Service and has been added to the AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA). This means you can use ElastiCache for Redis to help you power healthcare applications as well as process, maintain, and store protected health information (PHI). ElastiCache for Redis is a Redis-compatible, fully-managed, in-memory data store and cache in the cloud that provides sub-millisecond latency to power applications. Now you can use the speed, simplicity, and flexibility of ElastiCache for Redis to build secure, fast, and internet-scale healthcare applications.

ElastiCache for Redis with HIPAA eligibility is available for all current-generation instance node types and requires Redis engine version 3.2.6. You must ensure that nodes are configured to encrypt the data in transit and at rest, and to authenticate Redis commands before the engine executes them. See Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services for information about how to configure Amazon HIPAA Eligible Services to store, process, and transmit PHI.

ElastiCache for Redis uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-512 symmetric keys to encrypt data on disk. The Redis backups stored in Amazon S3 are encrypted with server-side encryption (SSE) using AES-256 symmetric keys. ElastiCache for Redis uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt data in transit. It uses the Redis AUTH token that you provide at the time of Redis cluster creation to authenticate the Redis commands coming from clients. The AUTH token is encrypted using AWS Key Management Service.

There is no additional charge for using ElastiCache for Redis clusters with HIPAA eligibility. To get started, see HIPAA Compliance for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.

– Manan