Amazon Unveils Virtual Private Cloud Service

 

With VPC, Amazon said users can extend security services, firewalls and intrusion detection systems to its cloud. Amazon VPC has no contracts.  Customers will only pay for the resources they use, Amazon said.

 

“For the last three years, AWS has provided companies of all sizes with on-demand, highly elastic and highly reliable technology resources in the cloud,” said Andy Jassy, senior vice president, Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), in a statement. “As more and more enterprises leverage the cloud, they want a simple, seamless way to migrate their large and complex IT infrastructures to AWS, and to use the security and management controls that their IT teams already know. We built Amazon VPC for this purpose—to allow any company to seamlessly connect their existing resources to the AWS cloud as if it were a part of their own datacenter.”

For example, global pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly is using resources from Amazon Web Services to support pharmaceuticals research, collaboration, and high performance computing.

 

 “We can now seamlessly integrate our internal computing environment with computing resources we’ve deployed on AWS, all without cumbersome configuration or management hassles," said Dave Powers, associate information consultant at Eli Lilly, said in a statement.

 

Cloud computing refers to delivering a hosted service over the Internet. Important cloud computing offerings include Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service. It is particularly useful for small to medium size companies.

 

And it’s a growing segment. A recent study by Telecom Trends International, a firm that conducts research on trends and developments in the telecommunications marketplace, found that the cloud computing services market will generate $45.5 billion in revenue by 2015.

 

While security and control concerns have some businesses taking slow steps toward cloud computing, Amazon officials have high hopes the company’s new service will eliminate fears and draw new users.

 

In other news, Amazon Web Services launched AWS Multi-Factor Authentication, which gives customers additional capabilities to access and control their AWS accounts. AWS MFA (News - Alert) provides another layer of security to the administration of a customer’s AWS account by requiring a second piece of information to confirm a user’s identity. 

 

With the service, users must provide a six-digit, rotating code in addition to their standard AWS account credentials, before they can make changes to their AWS account settings. AWS MFA, which will be offered as an optional feature of AWS accounts, will be available in the coming weeks. And this fall, AWS plans to launch new billing features that letcompanies link a group of AWS accounts together with one account acting as the billing entity for the group.