Amazon EFS now a HIPAA-Eligible Service

Today we are adding Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to our list of HIPAA Eligible Services.

With this addition, customers that have a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS can now store healthcare-related file data, including encrypted Protected Health Information (PHI), in an Amazon EFS file system. By providing a secure and encrypted file system, Amazon EFS can now be used as a part of applications that need to store research, genetics, informatics, or imaging data containing PHI.

Amazon EFS provides simple, scalable, elastic file storage for use with the AWS Cloud and on-premises resources via AWS Direct Connect. Amazon EFS is easy to use and offers a simple interface that allows you to quickly create and configure file systems. It provides massively parallel shared access for thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, enabling your applications to achieve high levels of aggregate throughput and IOPS with consistent, low latencies. Amazon EFS is built to elastically scale on demand without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.

Amazon EFS is a regional service designed for high availability and durability supporting a broad spectrum of use cases, including web serving and content management, enterprise applications, media and entertainment processing workflows, home directories, database backups, developer tools, container storage, and big data and analytics applications. Customers can move data securely and quickly from existing on-premises or in-cloud file systems into Amazon EFS with the EFS File Sync feature simplifying migrations and speeding time to production.

If you already have a BAA with AWS, you can use Amazon EFS immediately to transfer data into your HIPAA accounts. You must ensure that all PHI stored in Amazon EFS is encrypted in transit and at rest. Learn more about building healthcare applications on AWS, and visit the Amazon EFS product page, and see the AWS Region Table for complete regional availability information.