During October of last year, I wrote a post about a new product that was launched called VPNCubed. In fact, it is my opinion that VPNCubed will play a major role in helping enterprise customers move to Clouds.

Today’s release of VPN-Cubed will offer a security perimeter covering the IT assets deployed in any kind of ecosystem (cloud or managed). One of the biggest worries for enterprise customers is the need to cede control of the security of their data to the cloud provider. With this solution, the company can retain the control of security even inside the cloud. VPN-Cube uses the popular Open Source VPN software, OpenVPN, to act as an encrypted LAN inside a single cloud or as an encrypted WAN across multiple clouds. This allows the cloud based clusters or the hybrid cloud-enterprise datacenter ecosystem to appear as a single physical network similar to Enterprise 1.0 infrastructure. VPN-Cube enables enterprise software requiring multicast networking and, also, offers greater control over network addressing, thereby offering an enterprise level secure network either inside a single cloud or across multiple clouds. With VPN-Cubed, companies can easily scale their infrastructure in the cloud with the ability to seamlessly add the newly provisioned resources into their existing VPN-Cubed network.

Today CohesiveFT announced the release of VPNCubed for EC2.Now Amazon EC2 customers can create their own secure private network either within an EC2 regions or across several regions. VPNCubed offers additional capabilities which were not previously available for Amazon EC2 customers. These include

• Static addressing for the user's EC2 instances
• Topology control by using VPN-Cubed managers as virtual switches
• Virtual bridges or virtual routers
• Use of popular enterprise protocols like UDP Multicast for service discovery
• Encrypted communications between all devices on the overlay network

Their offering comes in two flavors. A free version allows customers to setup a VPNCubed based network inside one EC2 region (either US or Europe) or in one EC2 VLAN. The paid version allows customers to setup a network spanning across both the regions or across multiple VLANs.

The release of VPNCubed for Amazon EC2 is significant in two ways

• It helps enterprises leverage the capabilities and cost savings associated with Amazon EC2 service without worrying about the security of sensitive data
• It helps smaller companies have enterprise level network and security

I am pretty impressed with the progress of CohesiveFT in advancing the security in the Clouds. These solutions are not magic bullets in solving the issues associated with Cloud Security. However, these are significant steps in making Cloud more secure and enterprise ready.