Amazon Web Services has become the leading cloud service provider in the world, thanks to its focus on introducing increasingly advanced features.

Its immense service base of satisfied customers is clearly highlighted in the facts and figures published on ExpandedRamblings.com.

According to the report, there are well over 1 million active business customers for AWS around the world. AWS provides its ultra-efficient services with the help of over 8,000 partner network members and over 1,900 3rd party software and add-ons.

In addition, AWS operates through more than 18 infrastructure regions and over 52 availability zones placed in strategic locations worldwide.

This has allowed over 55,000 enterprise databases to be migrated to the AWS cloud. Each month, this immense global server network provides an impressive 70 million hours of run time to AWS customers.

This has boosted the AWS annual rate to over $30 billion. To ensure even smoother and safer services, Amazon introduced the AWS Nitro Enclaves.

What is AWS Nitro Enclave?

The AWS Nitro Enclave is a comprehensive system of server space that can be customized in several ways.

It gives the user to quickly devise and operate EC2 instances and provides increasingly advanced and versatile options for computing power, storage memory and networking solution.

What is AWS Nitro Enclave

What is AWS Nitro Enclave

In simple words, the AWS Nitro Enclave is a security extension especially designed for Amazon EC2 instances to process ultra-sensitive data in a secure and efficient manner.

It is an excellent option for enterprise customers to process private and confidential data in the safest way possible on cloud platforms.

There are several ways with which AWS customers can use various techniques to secure the data when in storage and while processing.

For instance, users can create custom keys to encrypt their data stored in Amazon S3 servers for more effective management.

Coincidentally, AWS already provides optimal security to data in its cloud servers, using conventional TLS and SSL encryption system.

Amazon also protects user data when it is being transferred between different services, such as between Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2.

How does AWS Nitro Enclave Protect Sensitive User Data?

Amazon Web Services are used by several industries that deal with sensitive data, such as life sciences, defense department, financial services as well as media and entertainment.

These industries regularly require storing and processing large volumes of confidential data on AWS cloud servers.

The security against breach of sensitive data, whether in storage or while processing, is of utmost priority to Amazon.

In addition, there are instances in which 3rd party vendors and partners default or there are disputes with customers and employees.

To remedy these problems, Amazon Web Services uses VPCs to make significantly detached processing systems that provide complete control to users and restricts access to only authorized users.

The AWS Nitro Enclave is the ideal solution for this. It is an excellent tool to configure isolated environments in EC2 instances that are supported by the AWS Nitro System.

The Nitro System has been around for a while and helps carve multiple isolated EC2 instances that run on the same hardware.

The AWS Nitro Enclaves is designed to isolate the EC2 instances even more.

This is done by compartmentalizing the CPU and storage of the common EC2 instance, which helps to protect ultra-confidential data and limits its access to other users or applications which share the instance.

What are the Advantages of Using AWS Nitro Enclaves?

The top-end security and flexibility of processing and storage of sensitive data are the two major advantages of using the AWS Nitro Enclaves.

AWS Nitro Enclaves provide a secure and flexible environment to process and store sensitive data. It is considered ideal to satisfy heavier production workloads as it gives the user complete control over allotment of storage memory and computing power for the isolated instance.

The flexibility of AWS Nitro Enclaves comes from the fact that each enclave operates an independent kernel with exclusive access to storage and computing resources.

Enclaves do not require external network connections, constant storage and can operate without the need for user access.

The isolated environment creates a local virtual socket (vsock) connection to provide a safe stream for data to flow in and out of enclaves. This connection ends at the EC2 instance.

Conclusion

In an increasingly competitive market, where data is the new gold, every major corporation is focused on providing a secure and efficient way to store and process sensitive data.

The AWS Nitro Enclaves is the perfect solution for such users as it provides completely isolated instances that have multiple security blankets and provides immense flexibility when it comes to assigning memory and CPU resources.

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AUTHOR

Steve is a product-marketer and Engineer at Cloudysave who works with Cloud Management and Adoption team. Over the past years, he has collaborated with multiple teams to provide a robust and cost-effective architecture patterns to influence business and engineering decisions. His key areas of interests include Cloud Costs Management, Security and DevOps Best-Practices.