Podcast: How AWS KMS could help customers meet encryption and deletion requirements, including GDPR

Encryption is a powerful tool to protect your data but it can be difficult to get right because it demands understanding how encryption keys are created, distributed, used, and managed. To make encryption easier to use, we created AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to let you scale your use of the cloud without struggling to ensure encryption is used consistently across workloads.

Because AWS KMS makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data, the service can be used to meet both encryption and deletion requirements in a data lifecycle management policy. Cryptographic deletion is the idea is that you can delete a relatively small number of keys to make a large amount of encrypted data irretrievable. This concept is being widely discussed as an option for organizations facing data deletion requirements, such as those in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Listen to the podcast and hear from Ken Beer, general manager of AWS KMS, about best practices related to encryption, key management, and cryptographic deletion. He also covers the advantages of KMS over on-premises systems and how the service has been designed so that even AWS operators can’t access customer keys.