Although cloud computing solutions have matured greatly during the past 18 months, clients still have questions on how best to take advantage of this delivery model. Many public cloud offerings require you to go “all in,” meaning your entire application and database must be moved into the cloud. This “all in” approach for enterprise applications is something that concerns many companies and government agencies, citing reasons such as the size or sensitivity of the database and performance issues, to name a few.

A virtual private cloud (VPC) provides the advantages of cloud computing in terms of pay for use, elasticity and rapid provisioning; however, it is not accessible over the public Internet. The client’s private network is extended from its data center into the virtual cloud provider’s data center—thus the VPC becomes an extension of the client’s internal network.

This is an attractive model for mid- to large-sized companies and agencies that have a number of enterprise applications. Since the VPC is an extension of your internal network, you can move certain components of your enterprise applications to the cloud, while other components—such as the database—can remain on your current infrastructure.

For example, you could move the web server portion—the component in an enterprise application that tends to have the most volatility—into the cloud, and the database and application servers can remain as is. Now you can benefit from the elasticity of the cloud while reducing the risk of moving sensitive or large volumes of data into the cloud environment. You also have capacity on demand and reduced security issues.

Of course, in making this choice, there is planning and setup time required to establish cloud connectivity and define security requirements since, unlike in the public cloud where you use the Internet for immediate connectivity, your enterprise network is connected into the VPC environment.

If you are looking to move to this model, make sure you ask potential cloud providers if their VPC environment will be “dedicated” to you, which will avoid the risk of having to compete for resources with other VPC clients. Also ensure they have this capability in multiple data centers and, if you have specific regulations on where data is stored, that they have data center locations that accommodate those requirements.