Amazon making virtual private clouds standard for customers

By Kevin McCaney

Connecting state and local government leaders

| March 12, 2013

AWS is making access automatic for new users; existing customers, including many in the public sector, will have to start a new account or launch services in a new region.

Amazon Web Service is making access to its Virtual Private Clouds automatic for new users of the Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service, which would give them access to features such as multiple IP addresses and expanded security controls.

VPC, which lets customers create virtual networks of EC2 instances and virtual private network connections to their own data centers, has until now been a separate service from AWS. Now, new users will get access to a VPN by default, Amazon said in a blog post.

The service is being rolled out by regions, starting with Amazon’s Asia Pacific Region, based in Sydney, Australia, and South America Region, based in São Paulo, Brazil, with others to be added one at a time, the company said.

The automatic access to VPCs applies only to new users. Current customers, including hundreds of U.S. government and other public-sector agencies, would have to either sign up for a new account or launch a service in a region they haven’t used before. (There are four regions in the United States, including those in Virginia, Oregon and California, and the Gov Cloud region, designed for sensitive government workloads.)

Regardless of how the service is launched, the VPC comes at no extra charge, AWS said. Once launched, customer will get features such as “assigning multiple IP addresses to an instance, changing security group membership on the fly and adding egress filters to your security groups,” according to AWS’ blog.

AWS, which in 2011 was accredited under the Federal Information Security Management Act, has proved popular for public-sector agencies moving services to the cloud, with reportedly more than 300 government and 1,500 educational customers.

The availability of VPCs to customers is, according to TechCrunch’s Alex Williams, another indication of Amazon’s further push into the enterprise.

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