On Aug. 26, 2009, Amazon announced a new initiative: the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Essentially, the new service enables a company to extend its internal data center to incorporate Amazon EC2 compute instances — it’s as though the perimeter of the data center has bulged out to incorporate a set of AWS compute resources. All traffic between the data center and the EC2 instances in the VPC runs over an encrypted virtual private network, ensuring that the traffic is secure and private. Tools commonly used within data centers, like traffic analyzers and intrusion detection, can be used on the Virtual Private Cloud. The net effect is that companies can incorporate scalable, cheap computing into their existing compute arrangements and treat the VPC resources as though they reside within the data center. The new services hold the potential for making enterprises that are reluctant to trust public cloud computing more comfortable and thereby increase acceptance of cloud computing. This service, by itself, does not address all aspects of “privatizing” a public cloud; the issue of securing persistent storage within Amazon still remains and must be addressed at the EC2 instance level rather than via a general AWS Service. Nevertheless, this is a significant announcement and one that hold the potential of increasing corporate adoption of AWS. This note looks at further implications of the announcement, what questions are left to be answered, and what to expect next from both Amazon and its competitors.