Today, Amazon is starting to make its cloud computing services available in European Union countries as well, the company announces in an online statement.
The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which is now also available in Europe, is intended to bridge the gap between a company’s IT infrastructures and Amazon’s Web-based services (Amazon Web Services), allowing use European companies.
The connection is made through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and allows access to a series of computing resources hosted in the Amazon cloud, ensuring its integration with the security resources already used in companies, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
To date, cloud computing from Amazon were only available to customers located in the United States, but, according to one of those responsible for Amazon, the solution was of great interest to European companies, which complained about not being able to use the resource.
«Since the launch of Amazon VPC in the US last fall, European customers have asked for the service to be made available in Europe,» says Adam Selipsky, vice president of Amazon Web Services.
Amazon’s offer allows customers to individually define the set of AWS services they want to access – through a VPN connection with IPsec encryption, making it possible, using APIs, to create their isolated networks, define the IP address that want and activate Amazon’s EC2 services on that network. Then, a VPN is created to link the web-based resources to the companies’ IT infrastructures. Traffic is monitored using the company’s own security tools.
Amazon also highlights as advantages of the service the lack of long-term contracts, minimum consumption or initial investments, and customers only have to pay for the resources they use, as is already the case in general in cloud computing solutions.
