Identify any unattached (unused) Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes available in your AWS account and remove them in order to lower the cost of your monthly AWS bill and reduce the risk of confidential/sensitive data leaving your premise.
This rule can help you work with the AWS Well-Architected Framework
This rule resolution is part of the Cloud Conformity Security & Compliance tool for AWS
optimisation
Any Elastic Block Store volume created in your AWS account is adding charges to your monthly bill, regardless whether is being used or not. If you have EBS volumes (other than root volumes) that are unattached to an EC2 instance or have very low I/O activity, consider deleting them. Removing unattached/orphaned Elastic Block Store volumes will help you avoid unexpected charges on your AWS bill and halt access to any sensitive data available on these volumes.
Note: Backup your data - once a volume is deleted, the data will be lost and the volume cannot be attached to an instance. Since EBS snapshots are much more cost-effective because are stored as objects using AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) service, it is recommended to create volume snapshots before deleting them.
Audit
To determine if there are any unattached and unused EBS volumes, perform the following:
Remediation / Resolution
To remove any unused and unwanted Elastic Block Store volumes from your AWS account, you need to perform the following:
References
- AWS Documentation
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- Amazon EBS Volumes
- Creating an Amazon EBS Snapshot
- Deleting an Amazon EBS Volume
- AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) Documentation
- describe-volumes
- delete-volume
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You are auditing:
Unused EBS Volumes
Risk level: Medium