Amazon has offered the feature, known as "elastic block storage," since April in a private, limited beta release. The company says it is now about to expand availability for the new feature by offering it in a wide release.

"In the coming weeks, Amazon EC2 will be launching a new persistent storage offering," Amazon wrote in an email to EC2 users, which was later posted on a handful of blogs. The feature enables users to attach persistent, unformatted or "raw" data storage to "instances" of EC2 applications.

In the past, users could distribute up 1.7TB of attached storage to opened EC2 applications, but the storage would be deleted once the instance was shut down. Now users can generate non-temporary data storage volumes of up to 1TB, available through the EC2 application but not directly associated with it.

Using elastic block storage, developers can take a "snapshot" of the data on Amazon's S3 cloud storage system, preventing the potential loss of data when an EC2 instance disappears.

Amazon is just one of several companies that offer cloud computing services to have upgrade its tools and capabilities in an effort to make them more attractive for CIOs with high security and reliability needs.

Last month, spam emails were allegedly sent on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud servers, which raised concerns among many critics of cloud computing about the service's potential security risks.

In March, Amazon expanded its EC2 service to include elastic IP addresses and availability zones.