Is Amazon’s VPC a Game-Changer?
August 27th, 2009 | Published in Commentary | 1 Comment
The cloud was abuzz this week with Amazon’s announcement of their Virtual Private Cloud offering. Will this enterprise-oriented offering finally persuade the skeptics? I think not.
To a very high degree, much of this new service offers functionality that was already doable. Extending your network into the cloud with a VPN and securing your instances from any external network access was not impossible – it just required some work. Amazon have done a great job at realizing what people are trying to do anyway and turning it into a seamless part of the product experience.
VPN or no VPN, at the end of the day when you run in the public cloud you are still outside your hardware, outside your premises and outside your control. Only when businesses realize that full control is more of a liability than an asset will they truly embrace the cloud and realize its potential.
October 15th, 2009 at 3:58 pm (#)
> Extending your network into the cloud with a VPN and securing your instances from any external network access was not impossible – it just required some work.
I think that for many enterprises the technical expertise and the effort of deployment meant not “some work”, but a quantum leap. True, it will take a while for the VPC offering to seep through corporate thought filters, but once it gets there it will be firmly embedded as a viable option.
The bigger obstacle to enterprise adoption is the risk paranoia, fueled lately by the study that revealed potential cloud leakage http://people.csail.mit.edu/tromer/cloudsec/