Thales has announced support for AWS’s Key Management Service (KMS), meaning customers using the service can ensure they maintain control over their security with bring your own key (BYOK) and hardware key protection.
The combination of Thales’, hardware security models and on-premise key management means businesses can add or remove support for specific keys as their policies demand.
In addition to adding an extra layer of security, it means organisations also have the flexibility to deploy apps in the cloud, while ensuring they have control of critical business operations in-house.
Jon Geater, chief technology officer at Thales e-Security explained that customers are increasingly requesting the technology allowing them to manage cryptographic keys in-house and release them to cloud providers only when it's completely necessary.
“As organisations focus on moving their more sensitive data and applications to the cloud, sound encryption key management has become a more important consideration,” Geater said.
“Moreover, local control over the generation and storage of keys can help organisations meet the security and compliance requirements needed in order to run their most sensitive workloads in the cloud.”
Amazon introduced the Bring Your Own Key part of its KMS service last week, while Google said it would allow customers to provide their own keys for use with its Compute Engine. Adding this functionality to third-party apps will make customers more likely to use cloud services in an environment where they can control security.
"Customers tell us that local control over the generation and storage of keys would help them meet their security and compliance requirements in order to run their most sensitive workloads in the cloud. In order to support this important use case, I am happy to announce that you can now bring your own keys to KMS," Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, wrote in a blog post.
