Introducing Amazon EBS Volume Clones across AWS accounts

AWS has rolled out a new capability that simplifies how teams share and replicate storage across organizational boundaries: Amazon EBS Volume Clones now support cross-account copying. If you’ve managed multiple AWS accounts—whether for different teams, environments, or business units—you know that moving data between them traditionally meant either creating snapshots, copying them across accounts, and then restoring them, or using more complex workarounds. This new feature streamlines that workflow significantly. You can now create direct copies of your EBS volumes in other AWS accounts and optionally re-encrypt them using a KMS key in the target account, all without leaving the AWS console or API calls.

Behind the scenes, the technical implementation is cleaner than previous approaches. Rather than the multi-step snapshot-copy-restore dance, EBS Volume Clones lets you reference a source volume from another account and create a full copy directly in the destination. The system handles the cross-account authorization through IAM policies, so you maintain fine-grained control over who can clone volumes where. The re-encryption step is optional but valuable—when you copy a volume, you can immediately apply the target account’s encryption key, ensuring data adheres to that account’s security policies without requiring separate encryption workflows afterward. This works whether your source volume is encrypted or unencrypted, giving you flexibility in how you handle sensitive data.

From a practical standpoint, this matters for several common scenarios. Teams managing infrastructure across multiple AWS accounts can now provision development or staging environments by cloning production volumes without manual data transfer steps. Organizations handling compliance requirements benefit from being able to copy encrypted data while immediately re-keying it to meet target-account security standards. Managed service providers or consultancies can more easily prepare customer environments with pre-configured storage. Even within the same organization, if you’re replicating workloads across accounts for disaster recovery or multi-region failover strategies, direct cloning reduces operational overhead and the window where data is in transit.

The feature integrates naturally with existing AWS workflows—it’s available through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and SDKs, so you can automate it as part of your Infrastructure-as-Code pipelines using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation. Combined with other AWS primitives you likely already use (IAM for access control, KMS for encryption, EventBridge for automation), cross-account EBS cloning fills a genuine gap in the data mobility story without requiring you to learn new tools or concepts. For teams managing multiple AWS accounts as part of their standard operating model, this is a capability worth evaluating for your next infrastructure refresh.