Amazon's virtual private cloud sets down in Europe

Amazon has begun offering its virtual private cloud in the Europe, the company said on Tuesday.

The Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) acts as a bridge between a company's datacentre and cloud services offered by Amazon Web Services, using an encrypted VPN to connect the two. Extending the service to the European Union will allow customers in the region to reduce latency and help them meet EU data protection laws, Amazon said.

"Customers with existing IT infrastructure in the EU can now deploy Amazon VPC in the same region in order to provide the best possible experience for their users. They can also deploy an Amazon VPC in the EU to ensure that their data remains in the EU," said Amazon in a blog post.

The company launched VPC in the US in August last year. It said that the feature would allow businesses to extend their firewalls and intrusion-detection systems, among other security measures, to their resources that are hosted by Amazon. In December, it opened up VPC to all users of its EC2 cloud-computing services in a public beta test.

"European customers have been requesting this same capability in Europe," said Adam Selipsky, Amazon Web Services vice president, in a statement.

The VPC announcement follows Amazon's extension in April of its Relational Database Service (RDS) to Europe, giving businesses in the region the ability to run on-demand MySQL 5.1 database instances on servers in the region. Amazon already offers EU-based versions of EC2 and Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud-based storage.

VPC currently works with EC2 and some other Amazon Web Services features. It incorporates service-level agreements and partnerships with some of the largest enterprise software vendors such as IBM, Oracle, BMC and Red Hat.