We are thrilled to announce that Heroku Shield for Redis is now generally available and certified for handling PHI, PII, and HIPAA-compliant data. Heroku Shield for Redis is the final missing data service for Heroku Shield, which is an integrated set of Heroku services with additional security features needed for building high compliance applications. All Heroku Managed Data Services — Heroku Connect, Heroku Data for Redis, Heroku Postgres, and Apache Kafka on Heroku — are now fully certified for handling PHI, PII, and HIPAA-compliant data as part of Heroku Shield. Security and compliance come standard with Heroku Shield, so developers and enterprises can focus solely on building great experiences.
In this new age of COVID-19, we know that developer agility and data security are critical concerns for anyone delivering apps with sensitive or regulated data. But the need to move fast is second only to the need to maintain security and compliance.
Our customers in regulated industries like Health & Life Sciences and Financial Services continue to push us in this direction and have informed our roadmap for years. Heroku Shield for Redis continues our ongoing investments in secure, compliant features like Bring Your Own Key, services like Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield, and external integrations over Private Link and mutual TLS.
Build Real-Time Apps with Secure Data, More Easily than Ever
Developers love Redis for its unique ability to deliver sub-millisecond response times and handle millions of operations per second. Its use cases range from well-known to emerging:
- Caching: Some data needs to be accessed quickly and very often. This is the sweet-spot for Redis.
- Database: Optional persistence makes Redis an attractive option for more than interacting with hot data in-memory.
- Job Queues: Queues are used extensively in web development to separate long-running tasks from the normal request-response cycle of the webserver.
- Session Storage: Every web app that wants to track users needs to store session information because HTTP is a stateless protocol. Redis makes a great data store for session data because of its high-performance characteristics.
- Leaderboard: Redis allows any interactive app with a count of up/down votes or a game with a scoring component to track real-time changes across a large body of users.
- Message Broker: Like the Leaderboard example, Redis functions as a lightweight and elegant pub/sub engine for broadcasting messages to one or more channels.
Heroku Shield for Redis makes these features and benefits available for developers working with sensitive and regulated data. What makes Heroku Shield for Redis possible are the additions and improvements in Redis 6, in particular, the new ability to encrypt traffic with TLS natively. TLS is mandatory and enforced on all Shield plans (and Premium and Private plans with Redis 6).
Heroku Shield for Redis runs the same foundation we use to protect our platform. Security is the goal and end-result of our excellence in engineering, and our compliance program verifies and ensures full-credit for the controls we both need in the shared responsibility security model.
Heroku Shield for Redis is available in all six Heroku Shield Private Spaces regions: Dublin, Frankfurt, Sydney, Tokyo, Virginia, and Oregon. PCI compliance for Heroku Shield for Redis is due in the fall of 2020.
Creating your Heroku Shield for Redis database is as simple as adding the service to a Heroku app in the Heroku Dashboard or CLI:
$ heroku addons:create heroku-redis:shield-7 -a sushi-app
About Heroku Shield
Heroku Shield, first released in June 2017, brings the power and productivity of Heroku to a whole new class of strictly-regulated apps. The outcome is a simple, elegant user experience that abstracts away compliance complexity while freeing development teams to use the tools and services they love.
Heroku Shield Postgres, also released in June 2017, guarantees that data is always encrypted in transit and at rest. Heroku also captures a high volume of security monitoring events for Shield dynos and databases, which helps meet regulatory requirements without imposing any extra burden on developers.
Heroku Shield Connect, first released in June 2018, enables the high performance, fully-automated, and bi-directional data synchronization between Salesforce and Heroku Shield Postgres — all in a matter of a few clicks.
Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield, first released in November 2019, provides all the power, resilience, and scalability of Kafka without the complexity and challenges of operating or securing your clusters.
About Heroku Data for Redis
Heroku Data for Redis is the key-value data store you love, with the developer experience you deserve.
Feedback Welcome
Redis 6 opens a new frontier of development for our customers and us. We look forward to seeing what you can do with it and expect to support more of its new features in the months to come.
Existing Heroku Shield customers can get started with Heroku Shield for Redis today. All developers can upgrade to Redis 6 today too. For more information, see the Dev Center articles for Heroku Shield or Heroku Data for Redis , or contact Heroku. Please send any feedback our way.
Want to learn more about Heroku Shield for Redis? Contact sales