Amazon Web Services cites pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co. as an early user of Amazon VPC. The service lets Eli Lilly integrate its internal computing environment with Amazon EC2 "without cumbersome configuration or management hassles," said Dave Powers, associate information consultant at Eli Lilly, in a statement.

For at least a year, Eli Lilly has been using Amazon EC2 and other cloud services to provide high-performance computing, as needed, to hundreds of its scientists. In January, Powers told InformationWeek that the company can have a new server up and running in three minutes (it used to take Eli Lilly seven and a half weeks to deploy a server internally) and a 64-node Linux cluster can be online in five minutes (compared with three months internally).

Amazon Web Services also announced Wednesday AWS Multi-Factor Authentication, which provides an additional layer of security to the administration of a customer’s account by requiring a second piece of identification.

Users must provide a six-digit, rotating code from a device in their physical possession, in addition to their standard AWS account credentials, before they are allowed to make changes to their AWS account settings. It will be offered as an optional feature of Amazon Web Service accounts.

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