title: Amazon RDS Security - Is there any alternative to Encryption at Rest?
body: <p>When using a Cloud DB Provider like the Amazon RDS service, the service is responsible for various things like patching / updates / backup etc, does that mean that Amazon employees have access to the data within the DB itself? </p>
  
  <p>If so, is there any way of ensuring that the provider's employees do not have access - to potentially misuse the data?</p>
  
  <p>One way that I am aware of is by using Encryption at rest i.e. have my application encrypt sensitive data before saving to the DB and decrypt it on retrieval. However, this is not only an overhead in terms of performance but also requires changes to my application itself.</p>
  
  <p>I am guessing that most customers who contemplate using a cloud DB service would probably have this as their first concern but I am somehow unable to get any specific answer around this either from the Amazon help / RDS security notes. </p>
  
  <p><em>Note : While I understand that this is not really a programming question but i do feel that its not generic enough for programmers so I am posting it here.</em> </p>