The Case for Enterprise-Ready Virtual Private Clouds

Cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2 provide customers with flexible, on demand resources at low cost. However, while existing offerings are useful for providing basic computation and storage resources, they fail to provide the security and network controls that many customers would like. In this work the authors argue that cloud computing has a great potential to change how enterprises run and manage their IT systems, but that to achieve this, more comprehensive control over network resources and security need to be provided for users. Towards this goal, the authors propose CloudNet, a cloud platform architecture which utilizes virtual private networks to securely and seamlessly link cloud and enterprise sites.