Salesforce.com, Inc., made a big announcement yesterday with the launch into general availability of Heroku Enterprise in a new update for its App Cloud.

Salesforce first outlined what to expect from Heroku Enterprise at its Dreamforce conference back in September 2015, describing it as the company’s enterprise-grade platform-as-a-service offering. It said that Heroku Enterprise would give customers invested in Salesforce and Force.com greater flexibility and more options for developing applications.

But although Salesforce says Heroku Enterprise is a platform for developing mobile and consumer facing applications, the stable release comes with new features for deployment, identity and security that should find plenty of appeal among its large enterprise customer base.

“Heroku Enterprise includes some key new capabilities: Private Spaces, Global Regions and Integrated Identity. Organizations with Private Spaces can now extend their corporate networks to take advantage of the cloud, running apps in a secure, private space with direct access to Salesforce’s trusted infrastructure. Global Regions allow for deployment flexibility; with the ability to run apps and workloads in data centers closer to the customer, IT managers can now ensure faster response times and improved latency.”

“For developers and admins who already manage Salesforce deployments, Integrated Identity enables seamless single sign-on (SSO) into Heroku Enterprise. With provisioning applied across both Salesforce CRM and custom apps, IT now only has to manage one set of logins.”

The Private Spaces capability seems to be one of the most significant. It provides a dedicated, private runtime for containers, or Heroku Dynos as Salesforce likes to call them.

“One of the more powerful new features of Private Spaces is the control it provides over the networking layer, and the ability to restrict inbound access and outbound traffic origination for the applications that run inside it. Using network controls, Heroku applications can now be bound to other applications, VPNs, or even behind the firewall deployments.”

Private Spaces allows Heroku Enterprise to connect to virtual private networks and integrate with hybrid cloud deployments, said Brian Goldfarb, senior vice president of App Cloud marketing at Salesforce, in an interview with ZDNet. As for Global Regions, the feature was brought in for those customers who’re concerned about data sovereignty, but Goldfarb said it has performance implications too.

“Global Regions is really about performance primarily,” he told ZDNet, adding that enterprises would also benefit from compliance gains as well. “For a Japanese company, connecting to a Global Region in Tokyo makes sense,” Goldfarb said.

Check out this blog post for a deeper dive into Heroku Enterprise’s features.

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