Last week, Amazon’s cloud chief, Andy Jassy, announced three new services that are being added to the company’s public cloud platform, two of which seem focused solely to serving enterprises. There has been some buzz that Amazon’s cloud is ready for enterprises, but are organizations ready to go all-in?

At the Amazon Web Services’ second annual cloud user conference, Jassy showed all of the compliance standards that Amazon’s cloud has achieved, from the government Federal Information Security Act (FISMA), to health care’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the payment card industry’s data security standard. Looking to keep its foot on the gas pedal, AWS announced three new products aimed specifically at the enterprise market.

The AWS CloudTrail provides a log of user activity within Amazon’s cloud that is then stored on the vendor’s storage platform. It comes armed with alerts to notify the enterprise of abnormal activity and protect it from intruders.

With the release of Amazon Workspaces, a hosted desktop platform, AWS dove into the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market. Competing with enterprise-focused companies like Citrix and VMware, Workspaces provides a central way to manage virtual desktops in a hosted public cloud using monthly pricing as well as integration with MS Active Directory.

The company also introduced Amazon AppStream, which automatically renders graphic-intensive workloads to be streamed directly on a variety of desktop, laptop, or mobile devices. The service uses the new graphics processing virtual machines AWS recently released to stream high-definition app video.

Holger Mueller, an analyst focusing on the cloud computing market for Constellation Research, says, “The enterprise angle is definitely coming on strong here.” The first few years of Amazon’s cloud service were a big hit for the developer community because it gave them easy access to low-cost compute and storage capacity. “They’ve passed the critical market point for developers,” Mueller says, noting that for future growth the company will have to penetrate the enterprise market.

AWS has already made strong strides – it offers GovCloud, which is an entire region of its public cloud devoted solely for government workloads. But there are still holes, Mueller says, such as enterprise support. AWS has been building up its enterprise sales and support staff in order to gain on Microsoft and IBM.

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