Amazon Web Services Wednesday launched a limited beta version of its 'Virtual Private Cloud' (VPC) service, with the aim of addressing some of the common security concerns related to cloud computing. The service will offer business customers their personal, "isolated" computing resources - in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - which would be accessible by a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

As such, the creation of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) will not only help customers connect Amazon to their current IT infrastructures, but also allow them to make use of their existing security systems and firewalls to protect data.

Noting that the VPC beta offering is essentially designed for companies considering an expansion of parts of their IT infrastructure onto a cloud computing platform, Amazon underlined that the service will be beneficial in terms of reduced costs resulting from sharing hosted computing systems.

About the financial aspect of the new service, Amazon specified that there will be no long-term contracts for the VPC, which would only necessitate a "minimum" upfront investment. Saying that customers will only pay for the resources that they use, Amazon elaborated that on top of regular EC2 compute and data transfer charges, VPC usage would entail US$0.05/hour charges for the VPN connection. Amazon has also said that the VPC beta is limited to one VPC per account and 20 subnets per VPC.