How To Encrypt an Existing RDS Database

Sometimes you need to apply security to an RDS database by encrypting it after it’s created. How do you do that? The short answer is: you can’t. Encryption has to be set up at the time of database creation. That’s not the whole story though. The Golden Rule of Cloud Computing is

    Infrastructure is transient, data is forever. 

In this case that boils down to:

• Make a snapshot of your database
• Create a new encrypted database from a copy of that snapshot
• Change the relevant network configuration to point to the new database
• Delete the old database

Pretty simple.

Still unsure? Contact us and we can do the work for you.