CipherCloud for Amazon Web Services (AWS)

As a US company, Amazon is subject to the US Patriot Act, and the data it manages in EC2 and S3 may be accessed by the US government regardless of where it is stored around the world. In addition, ensuring compliance with PCI, HIPAA, GLBA, and other regulations can delay or block migration to AWS. What’s a CIO to do?

The answer, according to AWS Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, is to encrypt private data destined for the cloud, and to employ best practices when it comes to classifying data. The whitepaper, Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes has outlined similar recommendations for customers:

CipherCloud Eliminates Privacy & Compliance Concerns with AWS
CipherCloud for AWS provides organizations with the ability to encrypt sensitive data destined for AWS storage offerings such as S3, SimpleDB, and EBS. The idea is simple—customers can choose from various encryption and tokenization strategies, and the encryption keys always remain with the customer. CipherCloud ensures that only the customer can access the data, regardless of where it resides. This doesn’t impact the front-end business applications that are leveraging AWS.

Secure Cloud Mashups
Every cloud application has its strengths and limitations. For instance, Force.com provides a great platform to manage structured data such as names, phone numbers, account numbers, etc. However, it’s not ideal to store unstructured data (files and attachments) due to high costs and size limitations. On the other hand, AWS S3 is 25 times cheaper for storing unstructured data.

CipherCloud Secure Cloud Mashup allows customers to tightly integrate Salesforce and Amazon S3 to provide a best of both worlds solution that eliminates size restrictions in Salesforce for file storage and offers significant cost savings. While doing so, end users see no change in application behavior—all their data and files seem to be stored in Salesforce. CipherCloud seamlessly encrypts all files and forwards them to S3 for storage, while sending a pointer to the file into Salesforce. All structured data continues to remain stored in Salesforce.

By implementing CipherCloud for AWS, organizations are able to ensure similar levels of security and privacy as on-premise file servers and databases, while maximizing the business benefits and cost efficiencies of AWS.

Next: Learn about CiperCloud's approach to encryption. 

Next Steps:

See an online demo of the CipherCloud solution now.
Download the business whitepaper CipherCloud Gateway – Overcoming Cloud Security & Compliance Concerns