Security, Convenience

 

Moreover, from the private beta, Selipsky said Amazon already has begun to see common use cases crop up for applications where there is proprietary data or workloads that need to be able to move in and out of the cloud, "like pharmaceutical companies with a lot of IP [intellectual property], or Wall Street firms with proprietary algorithms, or large media companies."

For instance, 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, an associate information consultant at Eli Lilly and Company, in a statement. "We can now seamlessly integrate our internal computing environment with computing resources we've deployed on AWS, all without cumbersome configuration or management hassles."

Meanwhile, software vendor Intuit leverages AWS for applications ranging from scalability testing for its online products to cloud-based engineering development and test environments. "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 of product development at Intuit, in a statement.  "We're looking forward to continuing our work with AWS to deploy qualified applications securely, reliably and cost effectively."

In addition, "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 of business development at Citrix Systems, in a statement. "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, also in a statement. "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 also 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, the company said. 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. 

Amazon officials said 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 aws.amazon.com/mfa. And 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," Selipsky said. "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."