On Aug. 26, 2009, Amazon announced a new initiative: the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which it describes as follows:

“a secure and seamless bridge between your existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables you to connect your existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend your existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include your AWS resources.”