Newly Updated Whitepaper: FERPA Compliance on AWS

One of the main tenets of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the protection of student education records, including personally identifiable information (PII) and directory information. We recently updated our FERPA Compliance on AWS whitepaper to include AWS service-specific guidance for 24 AWS services. The whitepaper describes how these services can be used to help secure protected data. In conjunction with more detailed service-specific documentation, this updated information helps make it easier for you to plan, deploy, and operate secure environments to meet your compliance requirements in the AWS Cloud.

The updated whitepaper is especially useful for educational institutions and their vendors who need to understand:

• AWS’s Shared Responsibility Model.
• How AWS services can be used to help deploy educational and PII workloads securely in the AWS Cloud.
• Key security disciplines in a security program to help you run a FERPA-compliant program (such as auditing, data destruction, and backup and disaster recovery).

In a related effort to help you secure PII, we also added to the whitepaper a mapping of NIST SP 800-122, which provides guidance for protecting PII, as well as a link to our NIST SP 800-53 Quick Start, a CloudFormation template that automatically configures AWS resources and deploys a multi-tier, Linux-based web application. To learn how this Quick Start works, see the Automate NIST Compliance in AWS GovCloud (US) with AWS Quick Start Tools video. The template helps you streamline and automate secure baselines in AWS—from initial design to operational security readiness—by incorporating the expertise of AWS security and compliance subject matter experts.

For more information about AWS Compliance and FERPA or to request support for your organization, contact your AWS account manager.

– Chris Gile, Senior Manager, AWS Security Assurance