Seattle (ip-192.com): Amazon announced a limited beta version of its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service, which connects a company's existing computing resources and Amazon's cloud as if they were part of one data center.

Companies can use a Virtual Private Cloud to move corporate applications, including e-mail, financial systems and CRM applications, into the Amazon cloud. According to Amazon, the new offering also includes security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to protect those private clouds.

The new private cloud offering gives customer access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, and adds such features as IPSec encrypted VPNs, multi-factor authentication, and other security measures to prevent unauthorized access to data being processed and stored in Amazon's cloud.

According to a post on Amazon’s AWS blog, the fact that VPC acts as through it is part of the network will reduce the management overhead associated with deploying cloud services, allowing for greater flexibility in corporate infrastructure and easing enterprise adoption.

“You can expand your corporate network on a permanent or temporary basis,” so the blog. “You can get resources for short-term experiments and then leave the instances running if the experiment succeeds. You can establish instances for use as part of a disaster recovery effort. You can even test new applications, systems, and middleware components without disturbing your existing versions.”

Companies planning to use VPC pay an extra $0.05 per hour for the VPN connection on top of standard EC2 computer and data transfer charges. The beta currently available is limited to one VPC per account and 20 subnets per VPC.

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