Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what data Amazon Web Services has access to as the public cloud host for her Department.

Amazon Web Services have publicly available policies and statements on access to customer data, which broadly state that they do not access data available within AWS accounts without receiving consent from the account holder. In line with wider government policy we follow the NCSC’s ‘Cloud Security Principles’ & ‘Standard Architecture for UK-Official on AWS’.

The Home Office has policies in place to ensure that our data is protected when it is hosted with Public Cloud Service Providers and we have full control of access to our accounts and data within them. Specifically, our policy is to mandate that all data is encrypted during transit and at rest, this means that if data is accessed by a third party from outside of the Home Office it is protected.