Secure Your Data with Automated Local Compute Disk & Block Storage Volume Encryption

As part of our mission to build the leading cloud for developers to create and scale applications, we’re continuing to add free intuitive features and products to secure your cloud resources. Our new Local Disk Encryption feature is the latest compute feature that we are gradually rolling out to all of our core compute regions.

Local Disk Encryption adds automatic, on-by-default data encryption to your newly deployed compute instances once this feature is enabled in your preferred region(s). Data security is a shared responsibility between us as a cloud provider and each of our customers. Disk encryption ensures that all data stored locally on a compute instance is encrypted starting at the point of creation to generally strengthen our collective security posture and help organizations meet regulatory requirements for data protection and privacy.

In the UI create workflow, a checkbox noting disk encryption will be visible and checked by default. You have the option to uncheck this box if you prefer to deploy without encryption.

The Linode API and developer tools, including Linode CLI, will now include an optional parameter disk_encryption that specifies the disk encryption policy of your compute instance. This parameter will default to enabled. Read our documentation and check out our API reference to learn more.

Note: Compute instances created after May 5 will automatically include local encryption. We are not retroactively encrypting pre-existing compute instances on behalf of customers at this time, so there will be no disruption to your existing compute resources unless you choose to rebuild with encryption enabled. We plan to add automated encryption to other products– stay tuned for more updates!

In addition to Local Disc Encryption, we are also enabling optional, industry-standard XTS-AES-128 encryption for newly created Block Storage volumes. Unlike local disks, encryption won’t be enabled by default, but customers can decide if they want to add this further layer of security when creating a new Block Storage volume.

This feature will be available to all customers regardless of whether your volumes are attached to compute instances.

As of May 5, Block Storage encryption is available in Chicago, Fremont, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, Washington D.C., Chennai, Mumbai Expansion, Osaka, Tokyo Expansion, Singapore Expansion, Amsterdam, Frankfurt Expansion, Madrid, Paris, London Expansion, Milan, Stockholm, São Paulo, and Melbourne. Learn more.

Between extensive internal testing for the last six months and a successful beta period with some of our largest customers, we are not expecting any disruptions. If you notice general performance impacts, degraded performance while deploying new compute instances and volumes, or issues rebuilding your previously existing compute resources, let us know via support ticket.