AWS launches VPC Encryption Controls in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to make it easy to audit and enforce encryption in transit within and across Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), and demonstrate compliance with encryption standards. You can turn it on your existing VPCs to monitor encryption status of traffic flows and identify VPC resources that are unintentionally allowing plaintext traffic. This feature also makes it easy to enforce encryption across different network paths by automatically (and transparently) turning on hardware-based AES-256 encryption on traffic between multiple VPC resources including AWS Fargate, Network Load Balancers, and Application Load Balancers.

To meet stringent compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, and FIPS 140-2, government customers rely on both application layer encryption and the hardware-based encryption that AWS offers across different network paths. AWS provides hardware-based AES-256 encryption transparently between modern EC2 Nitro instances. AWS also encrypts all network traffic between AWS data centers in and across Availability Zones, and AWS Regions before the traffic leaves our secure facilities. All inter-region traffic that uses VPC Peering, Transit Gateway Peering, or AWS Cloud WAN receives an additional layer of transparent encryption before leaving AWS data centers. Prior to this release, customers had to track and confirm encryption across all network paths. With VPC Encryption Controls, customers can now monitor, enforce and demonstrate encryption within and across Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in just a few clicks. Your information security team can turn it on centrally to maintain a secure and compliant environment, and generate audit logs for compliance and reporting.

With this launch, VPC Encryption Controls is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions. To learn more about this feature and its use cases, please see our documentation.