Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) for Encryption at Rest

Elastic Cloud now supports Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) for encryption at rest with AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, and Google Cloud KMS for existing deployments. This allows users to add a customer-managed encryption key to a running deployment in place, without recreating it. The process involves replacing each instance with an encrypted one, moving data with native Elasticsearch shard allocation. Snapshots taken before the transition are not available through the new repository, but a fresh snapshot is taken after the transition. This post details the strategic imperative for BYOK, its security benefits, limitations, and how enterprises can leverage customer-managed keys with AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, and GCP Cloud KMS for enhanced control and compliance. It also mentions that the subsequent blog post will focus on setting up AWS KMS with Elastic Cloud.