Overview of data encryption services on AWS

Encrypting your data is a critical step in ensuring that you protect its integrity and avoid data being readable by unauthorized parties. AWS enables you to encrypt your data both in transit (while it is being transmitted from a source to a destination) and at rest (while it resides on a disk).

To protect data in transit, you must transmit the data using Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) or some form of client-side encryption. SSL/TLS requires you to make use of certificates, which are used to encrypt and decrypt the data.

To protect data at rest, you must create and use encryption keys to encrypt and decrypt your data. Encryption keys are data files containing a long series of numbers or letters that is used by a cryptographic algorithm to encode and decode data. Examples of algorithms you may have heard of include Triple DES or Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) bit encryption.

An encryption key can either...