Private Cloud Options For Businesses Of All Sizes

Extending your IT resource into the cloud has become a lot more secure, as Steve Gold explains how businesses of all sizes can create a secure VPN between their physical IT storage and the cloud, allowing them access to mission-critical disaster recovery for the first time...

Whilst a large number of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) players have entered the cloud computing marketplace, it's only recently that the PAYG private cloud arena has really started to get rolling.

Although private cloud resources have less economic advantages than their shared facility peers, there are clear economies of scale to be enjoyed, for the simple reason that, in a conventional data centre, regardless of whether data is being stored on a given drive array, that array has to be spun, the air conditioning costs met, and the data centre staffing costs have to be apportioned.

With a private cloud option, you really do pay for what you use - with Amazon's virtual private cloud (VPC) facility, which is under beta test, users of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service can now have their own private cloud accessible through a closed, encrypted connection.

Amazon says that the service is designed to act as a secure bridge for projects that use both EC2 and on-premise IT systems by moving the Web services into a secured private network setting.

According to Natalie Booth, event director with the 360 IT event - the technology infrastructure show designed to success Storage Expo - the VPC option will allow all users of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform to access the VPC components as a beta service.

"The good news is that the service is available to all users, who will only incur charges after the service is activated. This is an important step for cloud technology, as it allows businesses of all sizes to access EC2 through a closed, encrypted connection," she said.