Virtual private cloud: to eliminate security privacy issues

As the cloud computing market matures, service providers are already beginning to offer "extra" security and privacy features that will emerge as default for the virtual private cloud.

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a cloud that runs on top of a service provider's infrastructure, but can be isolated from other tenants at the physical layer. The Virtual Private Cloud also gives users more control over the network configuration, finer granularity of security such as role-based access control and VPN control, as well as more stringent service level agreements (SLAs) than conventional public cloud offerings, .

Last month, Amazon Web Services announced that in its new EC2 instance, the VPC will appear as the default deployment model, starting with the Asia Pacific and South American regions.

"Many cloud service providers do a poor job of deploying an enterprise, especially in terms of security and control," said Kenneth White, chief biomedical information officer at Social and Scientific Systems Inc., which runs a large biotechnology research project on the Amazon VPC deploy.

For example, White's company was experiencing security issues when it came to using the cloud services provided by Digital Ocean. During his experiment, White found that it was possible to see the information of other users by running a simple Unix command.

Digital Ocean has now fixed this issue, but White does not think it will help with the security implications of a shared infrastructure.

"Being able to provide a really good compliance-level compliance system is just the most pressing need in the market right now, and I think this is an unknown area with lots of opportunities," he said.

Last week, we saw a new virtual private cloud vendor on the market named SugarCRM. A U.S. customer relationship management (CRM) vendor that claims its service is a rival to Saesforce.com and will offer limited availability in the new private cloud version. The private cloud version is still managed by Sugar and runs on Sugar's infrastructure, but physically and logically isolated from other SugarCRM user environments.

Lila Tretikov, Sugar's CEO, said it is even more important for users to be able to control data locations in specific countries.

Sugar private cloud is expected to become a common application by the end of this summer. Sugar's CRM software-as-a-service runs on Amazon EC2.

PEER 1 Hosting, a California-based company, recently unveiled a new key-core cloud service based in Canada's data center, with partners in Tier 3 in the UK and Germany. Tenants on key core clouds control how software is released in their environment, including when maintenance windows appear.

PEER 1 officially stated that they saw a new audience among cloud computing IT professionals and that security controls, performance SLAs, and high availability became the new desktop chip and needed to provide such cloud services to businesses.

Analysts also saw the emergence of this trend.

Other vendors have provided virtual private cloud services in the past, but the trend has grown stronger as they become more familiar with cloud concepts.

However, not everyone believes that virtual private clouds will be the future trend.

"I see other vendors doing it because a large percentage of businesses are still not comfortable with bringing their assets to the cloud," said George Reese, CTO of Enstratius, a private cloud and public cloud software developer . "But this segment of the population is shrinking and vendors can catch up in this market, so they have customers as customers consider cloud computing maturity."