Amazon Web Services News – May 2017

HIPAA Eligible Services Expanded

AWS has expanded its HIPAA Compliance Program to include Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, AWS WAF, and AWS Shield as HIPAA eligible Services. If you have an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS, you can now use Amazon CloudFront to accelerate the delivery of protected health information (PHI), Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration for faster transfers of PHI to and from Amazon S3, AWS WAF to protect your web applications from common web exploits, and AWS Shield to safeguard your web applications running on AWS from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Information on HIPAA eligible services on AWS can be found at AWS’s HIPAA Compliance page.

Read More: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/06/cloudfront-s3-transfer-acceleration-waf-shield-are-now-hipaa-eligible/

Dedicated Instance Requirement Removed

AWS customers are no longer required to use Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts to process PHI.  AWS has updated their HIPAA Compliance Whitepaper to reflect the change.

Previously, customers were required to pay $2/hour per region in which they were operating dedicated instances, plus an upcharge per instance, which equated to approximately $1500 per month per region.

Read More: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/aws-hipaa-program-update-removal-of-dedicated-instance-requirement/