Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Amazon Launches Private Cloud Offering

Seattle-based Amazon is looking to court corporate cloud computing developers, by extending its Amazon Web Services offering to private clouds, the firm said late Tuesday evening. According to Amazon, it has launched Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which will provide enterprises with isolated, AWS compute resources protected by virtual private network (VPN) connections. According to Amazon, the new offering also includes security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to protect those private clouds. The company that customers such as pharmaceuticals firm Eli LIlly and personal finance software firm Intuit are using the offering. The new private cloud offering gives Amazon customer access to Amazon EC2 instances, however adds such features as IPsec encrypted VPNs, multi-factor authentication, and other security features to prevent unauthorized access to data being processed and stored in Amazon's cloud.