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Cloud Security for European Companies: Staying GDPR-Compliant on AWS & GCP

DEVOIDA Team
3 min read

Using cloud services while maintaining GDPR compliance requires careful configuration

GDPR Cloud Requirements

requirementdescriptionawsSupportgcpSupport
Data ResidencyStore EU data in EU regionsEU regions availableEU regions available
EncryptionEncrypt data at rest and in transitKMS, TLSCloud KMS, TLS
Access ControlLimit who can access dataIAM, OrganizationsIAM, Resource Manager
Audit LoggingTrack all data accessCloudTrailCloud Audit Logs
Data Processing AgreementLegal contract with providerAvailableAvailable

AWS GDPR Configuration

AWS GDPR Setup:

Region Selection:
  Primary: eu-central-1 (Frankfurt)
  Secondary: eu-west-1 (Ireland)
  
Encryption:
  - Enable default EBS encryption
  - Use KMS customer-managed keys
  - Enable S3 default encryption
  - RDS encryption enabled

Access Control:
  - IAM roles (not users) for applications
  - MFA required for console access
  - CloudTrail enabled all regions
  - GuardDuty enabled

Data Residency:
  - S3 bucket policies restrict to EU regions
  - SCP policies prevent non-EU deployments
  - VPC endpoints for AWS services

GCP GDPR Configuration

GCP GDPR Setup:

Region Selection:
  Primary: europe-west1 (Belgium)
  Secondary: europe-west3 (Frankfurt)

Encryption:
  - Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)
  - Cloud Storage encryption
  - BigQuery column-level encryption

Access Control:
  - Organization policies
  - VPC Service Controls
  - IAM conditions
  - Audit logging enabled

Data Residency:
  - Resource location restrictions
  - Org policy constraints
  - Data residency commitments

Compliance Checklist

## GDPR Cloud Checklist

### Infrastructure
- [ ] Using EU regions only for EU data
- [ ] Encryption enabled at rest
- [ ] Encryption enabled in transit
- [ ] Audit logging configured
- [ ] Access logs retained (required period)

### Legal
- [ ] DPA signed with cloud provider
- [ ] Standard Contractual Clauses in place
- [ ] Data processing records maintained
- [ ] Privacy impact assessment completed

### Technical
- [ ] IAM policies reviewed
- [ ] Network security configured
- [ ] Backup encryption verified
- [ ] Deletion procedures tested
- [ ] Data export capability verified

Need help with GDPR-compliant cloud setup?

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