AWS now helps businesses meet regulatory compliance issues

Wherever you are in the world, regulatory compliance is a growing issue for all sizes and types of businesses. The need to store data in certain forms, to keep original files, to archive emails and so on is pressing. Amazon Web Services has a new feature for its Glacier storage service to help in these endeavours: Glacier Vault Lock.From data protection laws, to Singapore Exchange financial rules and regulations, Amazon Glacier Vault Lock allows the compliance officer in your enterprise or company to set controls across a range of Glacier Vaults and manage them via policies, locks and and time-based rules.

This means that certain essential records can be registered as ‘undeletable’, ensuring that no one can remove them. Others can be set to be kept for a certain length of time to comply with whatever rules your business needs to follow. So a customer database can be kept for three years, while your tax records can be stored for seven, depending on local rules.

Once a file or archive is locked, there is nothing anyone can do to change or remove it. The policy becomes fixed and Glacier becomes a time vault for these files, enforcing the rules, with Amazon’s cloud service as a useful repository, and one that is unlikely to vanish.

Rules can be set to various levels using AWS identity management controls, thanks to the policy language built into AWS’s Identity and Access Management service for easy creation. Once set up, the rules can be tested before being locked down.

Once locked, the policy cannot be changed or deleted, making it a practical solution for any Singapore-based or other company with compliance issues or industry regulations to follow. It helps create a safe archive, should the company need that data for legal or audit purposes.

The policies themselves can be shared with regulators to prove that your business is in compliance, all of which helps make AWS an even more useful feature for any business, not just for crunching numbers, processing rapid cloud-based transactions or storing buckets of general business data.