Amazon Launches Private Cloud Service

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Web Services, hoping to address some of the security concerns of cloud computing, on Wednesday launched a new service for creating private clouds. The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud provides business customers with their own, "isolated" computing resources in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, accessible by a virtual private network.

Amazon said customers will be able to use their existing security services and firewalls for their private clouds. Amazon VPC will have no long-term contracts, requires "minimum" upfront investments, and customers will only pay for the resources they use, Amazon said in a statement.

The offering is designed for companies looking to expand parts of their IT infrastructure onto a cloud computing platform, to benefit from the reduced costs that come from sharing hosted computing systems.

Using a few API calls, customers will be able to create an isolated network, specify an IP address range, and launch the Amazon cloud into that network.

They'll then create a VPN to bridge Amazon to their existing IT infrastructures. Existing security and networking technologies will apply to any traffic moving between a customer's private clouds within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the public Internet, Amazon said.Concerns about security and control are causing some businesses to move cautiously with cloud computing, or avoid it altogether. Amazon hopes the new offering will address those concerns and attract businesses that view private clouds as a more viable alternative to public ones.

Among a survey of 500 software developers conducted by research firm Evans Data, developers cited data recovery and security as major concerns about cloud computing. Forty-one percent said they had no plans to develop applications for the cloud or deploy existing applications to the cloud. But of those already involved in cloud development, a greater percentage were developing for private clouds instead of for public clouds. Half of the developers surveyed using Amazon EC2, which has thus far been public, have said they were doing so experimentally or for prototyping an application, not to run a business critical application.

Amazon  Web Services cites pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co. as an early user of Amazon VPC. The service lets Eli Lilly integrate its internal computing environment with Amazon EC2 "without cumbersome configuration or management hassles," said Dave Powers, associate information consultant at Eli Lilly, in a statement.

For at least a year, Eli Lilly has been using Amazon EC2 and other cloud services to provide high-performance computing, as needed, to hundreds of its scientists. In January, Powers told InformationWeek that the company can have a new server up and running in three minutes (it used to take Eli Lilly seven and a half weeks to deploy a server internally) and a 64-node Linux cluster can be online in five minutes (compared with three months internally).

Amazon Web Services also announced Wednesday AWS Multi-Factor Authentication, which provides an additional layer of security to the administration of a customer's account by requiring a second piece of identification.Users must provide a six-digit, rotating code from a device in their physical possession, in addition to their standard AWS account credentials, before they are allowed to make changes to their AWS account settings. It will be offered as an optional feature of Amazon Web Service accounts.