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Comment by mattjung | Hacker News Reader

It allows enterprises to easily and securely integrate servers that run in the cloud with their own internal infrastructure via a VPN. This fosters hybrid environments (internal IT + cloud in parallel) and thereby lowers the barriers for migrating IT services incrementally to cloud services. It takes away one of the most cited obstacles for the adoption of cloud computing in enterprise IT: security.

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The obstacle is that most major corporations aren't going to keep their most important data on some other corporations computers. Insecure transit was not the primary problem with AWS for those situations and those companies. There are many ways to securely send data over the Internet, and most don't require IPsec to be provided by Amazon.

The network isolation is somewhat interesting...but it makes me wonder why non-"private" AWS services aren't already isolated at the network layer. There's no reason why they couldn't be. They already control everything that goes in and out of every virtual machine in their data center, there's no reason the default should be for any machine to be able to talk directly to any other machine.

Thanks, I get confused sometimes by enterprise lingo.

My guess is the warm secure feeling will last until the new security tradeoffs of cloud computing become better understood a few months from now. But since so much is about perception, this is a clever move.

I agree that is by far not the end of the security discussion, especially, there is always that issue of trust towards the cloud provider itself. Do you trust Amazon's VPN, privacy mechanisms, etc. or do you prefer a third-party provider? Similar to: do you trust MS Firewall or the one of a third-party provider?

But I think it is more than only addressing perception - the alternative until today was building your own VPN by hand and dealing with all those dynamic IP addresses. Very awkward and error prone...

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