I'm working at a large company that takes data retention and compliance very seriously. We've had our developers uploading all kinds of data to AWS services like S3, RDS, Redis, and EC2. I'm curious about how we can be sure that data is genuinely deleted. For example, I can terminate an EC2 instance and wipe its database, but technically, the data might still exist until it's overwritten, right? Back in the day with physical servers, we had to degauss hard drives to ensure data was destroyed. What are the best practices for handling data deletion in AWS?
3 Answers
AWS probably does it better than a lot of setups. For example, EBS volumes use ephemeral keys for encryption, which means even if someone physically stole a disk, the data would be unreadable.
You can check AWS documentation for their shared responsibility model or security info. AWS claims that when you delete data, it's gone, but you need to trust them. Questions like security on your EC2 instances, encryption keys, and access rights also factor in. Just be sure you understand how data is stored and deleted in your specified regions.
That's a great point. I was just hoping for real-world examples to see if anyone had run into issues with this.
To manage AWS data compliance, you can access AWS Artifact to download compliance reports. This will show your compliance team that AWS is properly handling data deletion. Trust me, don’t try to answer all those compliance questionnaires like it’s a standard data center tour—your auditor might end up wanting a peek at us-east-1!
A tour sounds fun! I’m sure AWS would love that!
Thanks for the tip! I was just wondering about the docs and whether compliance measures were standard. Appreciate your help!
They better be doing it better than I am! If it was up to me, we’d be in big trouble!