amazon

As I’ve written before the Enterprise industry is extremely leery of the cloud – both because of security and data ownership. The idea is that if their data is not on their servers – they can’t protect it and they don’t “own” it. Yesterday I had a discussion with a colleague who was tasked with migrating a legacy SQL Server Environment into the company’s new virtual server environment. I said – “You know it would take a lot less work, time, infrastructure, money, and maintenance if you moved your data operations to the cloud”.

I got a blank stare… “I’d never get approval for that”, he said.

This is why – so far – the cloud has been relegated to the SMB (small-medium sized business) market. Companies like mine have been able to take advantage of the cloud in so many ways while remaining a small, low budget company.

Amazon took their first step in the direction of the enterprise market late last year by offering an SLA (service level agreement) to its users with a 99.95% availability commitment.

Today’s announcement takes the next logical step – private “clouds” that addresses one of their primary issues, security.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you create your own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances and connect it to your existing network using an IPsec VPN connection. This new offering lets you take advantage of the low cost and flexibility of AWS while leveraging the investment you have already made in your IT infrastructure.

What this means in RPS (real people speak) is that you can create your own private networks in the cloud that connects to your own private network – for authentication among other purposes.

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