CloudClip.Net … so many clouds so little light …

Amazon’s Web Services Personal VPN Jumps the Cloud Firewall

The cloud is awesome. But getting data across a firewall and into the cloud or back again can prove to be a non-starter. Take Sharepoint for example. A great product, but I still have not seen a proven model to give Enterprise Sharepoint Access to a large business customer without some act of IT. Most corporate VPN networks will NOT ALLOW ANY VENDORS. So if your stuff is in SharePoint internally, you have to figure out another way to get it “outside” the firewall for your customers to access. Amazon’s Virtual VPN connection looks like a quickstart option.

Amazon Web Services VPN Cloud

It looks as simple as pie. I’m sure it’s less than that, but here’s the word from Amazon on their new VPN-enabled cloud services:

Here’s all you need to do to get started:

1. Create a VPC.
2. Partition your VPC’s IP address space into one or more subnets.
3. Create a customer gateway.
4. Create a VPN gateway to represent the AWS end of the VPN connection.
5. Attach the VPN gateway to your VPC.
6. Create a VPN connection between the VPN gateway and the customer gateway.

The full instructions are a bit more technical, but for now let’s just say Amazon has fired the first grappling hook over the corporate firewall, and that’s a good thing.

The limited beta application for admission is here.