Amazon Web Services today announced Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources. Amazon VPC integrates today with Amazon EC2 compute resources, and will integrate with other AWS services in the future. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no long-term contracts, minimum spend or up-front investments required. With Amazon VPC, you pay only for the resources you use. To get started using Amazon VPC, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

“For the last three years, AWS has provided companies of all sizes with on-demand, highly elastic and highly reliable technology resources in the cloud. As more and more enterprises leverage the cloud, they want a simple, seamless way to migrate their large and complex IT infrastructures to AWS, and to use the security and management controls that their IT teams already know,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “We built Amazon VPC for this purpose—to allow any company to seamlessly connect their existing resources to the AWS cloud as if it were a part of their own datacenter.”

With Amazon VPC, AWS customers can create an isolated set of AWS resources that they then access via an industry-standard encrypted IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. Using a few simple API calls, users create their isolated network, specify the IP address range of their own choosing, and then launch Amazon EC2 instances into that network. Next, users create a secure VPN to bridge those AWS resources to their existing IT infrastructure. Cloud traffic bound for the Internet routes over the VPN where it is examined by the customer’s existing security and networking technologies before heading to the public Internet. With Amazon VPC, customers can access their resources running in the AWS cloud as if these assets were running within their existing IT infrastructure.

Eli Lilly is a global pharmaceuticals company using on-demand resources from Amazon Web Services to support pharmaceuticals research, collaboration, and high performance computing. “Eli Lilly and Company is excited about Amazon VPC, as it gives us the convenience to securely bridge hosts on our private Lilly network with the elastic computing capability of AWS,” said Dave Powers, Associate Information Consultant at Eli Lilly and Company. “We can now seamlessly integrate our internal computing environment with computing resources we’ve deployed on AWS, all without cumbersome configuration or management hassles.”

“Amazon VPC enables Intuit to expand its use of AWS by making it possible to extend parts of our existing on-premise security and networking policies to our cloud infrastructure,” said Jerome Labat, Vice President, Product Development of Information Technology at Intuit Inc. “We’re looking forward to continuing our work with AWS to deploy qualified applications securely, reliably and cost effectively.”

“Amazon VPC will enable our more than 200,000 enterprise customers to seamlessly expand their Citrix XenApp infrastructures by adding highly secure and reliable on-demand resources from AWS,” said Frank Artale, Vice President, Business Development at Citrix Systems. “By leveraging Amazon VPC, our mutual customers now have access to resources that appear as a natural extension of their current on-premises Citrix based applications.”

“Our enterprise customers are eager to take advantage of the flexibility enabled by Amazon VPC,” said Stephen Elliot, Vice President of Strategy for CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit. “CA’s Business-Driven Automation solutions together with Amazon Web Services can help enterprises to provision, configure, monitor and manage computing resources to respond quickly to changing business demands.”

In addition, Amazon Web Services today announced AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (AWS MFA), which offers customers additional capabilities to access and control their AWS accounts. AWS MFA provides an additional layer of security to the administration of a customer’s AWS account by requiring a second piece of information to confirm a user’s identity. With AWS MFA enabled, 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. AWS MFA will be offered as an optional feature of AWS accounts and is easy to set up and use via the AWS web site. AWS MFA will be available in the coming weeks; to learn more and to be notified when it becomes available, visit http://aws.amazon.com/mfa. Later this fall, AWS will also release additional billing features that allow companies to link together a group of AWS accounts with one account acting as the billing entity for the group, providing additional visibility and control of a company’s total AWS account usage.

“The flexibility to add additional account security mechanisms via AWS Multi-Factor Authentication has been frequently requested by enterprise customers,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. “We will continue to add features to our services that make it even easier for more customers to leverage the benefits of the AWS cloud.”