[bradstewart]

> that encrypting an S3 bucket with an AWS-managed key doesn't really prevent anything beyond someone physically stealing a hard drive from the AWS data center

It does, though. To get that data, you now need access to the bucket itself _and_ the KMS-managed encryption key. You might not be protecting the data from AWS, but one bucket misconfiguration doesn't lead to wholesale data loss now.

Is it perfect? No. You can misconfigure both. But misconfiguring KMS access is harder to do.

[mjr00]

To be clear, I"m talking about using the default "AWS KMS key" as they call it now, not managing your own keys. Just click the box on S3 and it's encrypted at rest, but completely transparent. If a user has access to the S3 bucket, they have access to the data within it. This has been sufficient for every enterprise client I've worked with because it checks the "data encrypted at rest" box for SOC2, ISO-27001, etc.