Amazon Promises GDPR Compliance For AWS By May 2018

May 2018 deadline, so to say. Amazon has promised to its cloud services platform will all be GDPR compliant before the new EU data privacy regulations are enforced next year.

It has also outlined plans to offer customers assistance with this.

The cloud giant is all prepared for the May 25, 2018 date, which is when the enforcement of the new EU privacy law begins. Starting this day, compliance of the new General Data Privacy Regulation will become mandatory for all businesses and organizations that collect and process personal data.

More specifically, personal data related to any EU person.

Amazon is not the only cloud company that has announced its intention to be compliant of these new laws. Microsoft also committed, earlier this year, that its Azure platform and all of its cloud services would be compliant by the deadline.

Getting back to AWS, Stephen Schmidt, vice president, security engineering and CISO at Amazon Web Services, detailed this in a blog post, saying:

“AWS welcomes the arrival of the GDPR. The new, robust requirements raise the bar for data protection, security, and compliance, and will push the industry to follow the most stringent controls, helping to make everyone more secure. I am happy to announce today that all AWS services will comply with the GDPR when it becomes enforceable on May 25, 2018.”

According to Schmidt, AWS will also offer a number of services and tools to build infrastructure that is compliant with GDPR on top of the Amazon Web Services platform, and provided details of some of these tools that the company will be offering to its customers to help with this compliance.

These new rules provide more rigorous requirements on the collection and use of personal data, and how it is removed after it is no longer needed.

It also grants individuals the right to delete their data.

Significant penalties are in place for failure to comply with the GDPR. Organizations that breach it can be booked for fines of up to 4% of their annual global turnover or 20 million euros, whichever is greater.