vCider announced the second version of its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a platform that enables enterprise customers to extend their cloud infrastructure to third party providers. The offering supports Amazon EC2 and Rackspace among other services, all of which can be leveraged concurrently in a vCider deployment.

The biggest addition to v2.0 is security. Companies can run firewalls, intrusion detection system (IDS) and other data protection software in the VPC, which natively includes a few security measures of its own. These include network encryption, ‘cloud cloaking’ that isolates remote deployments from public access and private IP addresses. Users can extend their local LAN to vCider via a distributed virtual switch, and manage instances hosted by 3^rd party providers via its REST API.

“Security has been one of the barriers to cloud deployments,” says Wikibon Senior Analyst, Stu Miniman. “vCider v2.0 allows companies to extend the security of private environments to heterogeneous cloud deployments.”

Organizations are gradually moving into the cloud, and take advantage of being able to offload certain workloads for what is–at least in most cases, a lower rate than what an in-house infrastructure upgrade would cost. The medical industry is one particular sector where adoption has been growing quite rapidly and vendors are addressing this opportunity.

Last week VMware entered into an agreement to provide Peake with its virtualization technology. The company, a joint venture between two healthcare giant, is offering a cloud storage service dedicated to hosting medical images. It aims to provide doctors more flexibility and make the system a little bit more efficient by speeding up patient data sharing between different institutes.

Gaming is another area where the cloud is playing an increasingly prominent role, in addition to flash: one of Fusion-io’s latest clients is Host Europe GmbH.