A VPN allows you to create a secure tunnel for network traffic between your on-premises data center and your AWS account using the Internet Security Protocol (IpSec). AWS VPN functionality comes in several distinct flavors, as follows:

• A managed VPN service to enable clients to connect to your AWS VPC and on-premises environments. Users connect to the VPN using a client based on the OpenVPN standard.
• CloudHub, which an AWS service that allows you to create a secure network route between remote office locations.
• Site-to-Site VPN, which is a secure connection between your data center and your VPC.

In this recipe, we will show you how to set up a VPN connection between your data center and your VPC. The benefit of creating a link like this is that all the data transfers between the two sites are sent through a secure IPSec tunnel, instead of traveling over the public internet. This kind of locked down communication is often an absolute requirement for complying with industry-specific rules and regulations.