AWS Boosts DynamoDB Encryption

Security paramount. Amazon has recently upped the ante for its NoSQL database service, DynamoDB, which now comes with improved encryption and increased security options.

Keener eyes among you may already be aware of the series of reports, throughout the course of 2017, talking about how data stored on the AWS cloud platform was left exposed. Organizations large and small suffered from these data breaches, mostly on the S3 storage service on the Amazon cloud.

Long story short, these type of security problems remain widespread.

Luckily, Amazon Web Services stepped up its game last year, publishing data protection guidance and enacting new security controls to ensure that the data hosted on its cloud remained safe.

The latest development in this regard in the new DynamoDB encryption at rest capability, which the company detailed in a recent blog post, saying:

“Today we are giving you another data protection option with the introduction of encryption at rest for Amazon DynamoDB. You simply enable encryption when you create a new table and DynamoDB takes care of the rest. Your data (tables, local secondary indexes, and global secondary indexes) will be encrypted using AES-256 and a service-default AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key.”

According to Jeff Bar, the new encryption option has no effect on latency — there is no storage overhead and this security measure is completely transparent.

In other words, users will be able to insert, query, scan, and delete items as before.

This new feature is available now in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon) and the EU (Ireland) regions, at no extra charge. Other regions are sure to receive access to this encryption capability soon enough.