Amazon has announced a new Virtual Private Cloud offering, allowing customers to build “a secure and seamless bridge” between their data centres and Amazon’s EC2 cloud network.

The service allows companies to set up a private cloud within Amazon’s EC2, which is connected to their data centre by the IPsec VPN.

They can then extend the security and management tools, including firewalls and intrusion-detection systems, that are protecting their own data centres to their virtual cloud network.

If an enterprise needs additional resources it can then fire up an instance within EC2 which is treated like any other machine in its data centre, without needing to worry about the security ring fencing it.

According to Amazon, “virtual private clouds” have been the most popular feature request from enterprises. The program is currently in limited beta and enterprises looking to join will need to sign up on the Amazon Web Services website.

ANI