Encryption as a Service - Would it work?

There are things we all know we should do, but we keep pushing them off because, well… they’re a pain to deal with. Encryption is one of those things.

Everyone knows it’s necessary. Any company handling even slightly sensitive data (and honestly, that’s basically every company these days) has some rule saying that data needs to be protected, that personal information can’t be stored in plain text, that it has to comply with some regulation — LGPD, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2… the whole alphabet soup. But then reality kicks in. You call a meeting with the product team, the engineers, maybe security, and throw this on the table: “Folks, we need to start encrypting sensitive data.”
cric cric cric. (Yes, this is my interpretation of the silence.)

Someone raises an eyebrow. Someone else changes the subject. And then comes the classic: “Yeah, we’re totally on board… just after the next release, okay?”

And I get it. Doing encryption “the right way” involves a bunch of annoying stuff: key management, database schema versions, API rewrites, performance concerns, fallback strategies, monitoring everything. And there’s always that lingering fear: “What if we lose the key? What if the data gets corrupted? What if we encrypt the wrong thing? What about the single point of failure? Who's going to maintain it”

So what happens is that security becomes a promise for the future. It ends up buried in a ticket labeled “low priority,” with a note saying “to revisit when we have time.”

But… what if it didn’t have to be like that?

Lately, I’ve been exploring a path that makes a lot of sense to me: Encryption as a Service. And I’m not talking about AWS HSM, HashiCorp Vault, or some other infrastructure monster that requires a master’s degree to run. I’m talking about something simple, straightforward, developer-first. The kind of thing where you send a payload and get it back encrypted — no need to be a crypto expert.

The idea is this: instead of having every engineering team out there trying to figure out how to protect their data, why not offer encryption as a service? Something stateless, with no database, no storage, no magic. You send the data, specify what needs to be encrypted, and you get it back, safe and ready to store wherever you want. You’re the one storing it — but it’s already protected.

And here’s the beauty of it: you don’t need to rewrite your whole app. Instead of baking encryption deep into your business logic, you treat it like a separate data transformation layer. If your policy changes tomorrow, you just update a manifest. No rework. No headaches.

This model takes the burden off the product team. Encryption becomes infrastructure. Plumbing. Just like you don’t waste time debating which HTTP library to use for a request, you don’t need to argue about how to protect a customer’s SSN. It’s already handled.

And there’s more. In a world where everything is being integrated with AI, external services, plugins, and automations, protecting data at the source is practically mandatory. Think about how many teams are throwing sensitive data into AI agents without even considering what they’re exposing. Do you really think all those prompts are being audited, encrypted, versioned?

If we can wrap this problem into a service — and do it in a lightweight, transparent, easy-to-adopt way — we can eliminate one of the biggest bottlenecks in modern security without slowing down delivery.

Now, I’m not saying this model will work for everyone. Some companies will still need a more robust solution, tightly integrated with hardware, access controls, and all the guarantees in the world. But for 90% of the use cases — the ones that suffer the most because they lack time or crypto expertise — a simple plug-and-play encryption layer might be exactly what’s been missing.

At the end of the day, it’s a way of saying: “Hey, I don’t want your data — but if you’re going to store it, at least store it safely.”
The system I’m building doesn’t store anything. No database. No metadata. No content logs. It just transforms. Encrypts. Hands it back to you. That’s it.

And the best part? It can be exposed as a simple REST API. Or run as a Lambda. Or even live at the edge. It’s really, really lightweight.

I’m convinced that if we stop treating encryption like “something we’ll deal with later” and start approaching it as an essential service — like a CDN, like logging, like authentication — adoption will go up. Security will improve. And rework will go down.