Letting your telco help you reach that cloud

AT&T is in a special position of providing cloud computing services to customers while also providing other cloud computing vendors the access their customers need. We talk to Joe Weinman, Strategy and Business Development VP, AT&T on how they straddle this line.

Many businesses have already adopted, and many others are currently evaluating the technology. Most surveys indicate that a majority of CIO’s are actively pursuing cloud-based solutions.

 

A few things have been holding up adoption. First, like any other new technology, there are lags between introduction, awareness, trials, and production. Secondly, there is a lot of information that is not completely on the mark. For example, a well-respected consulting firm recently released a report that says that cloud services are—on a unit cost basis—may be more expensive than enterprise do-it-yourself. While true, it misses the mark because unit costs are not the correct comparison, total cost coupled with performance and flexibility is.

 

The compelling business arguments revolve around enhanced scalability, reduced total cost, and reduced risk. The compelling technical arguments revolve around enhanced performance and reduced latency for interactive applications, when using a cloud service provider such as AT&T with a global footprint and Internet data centers sitting right on our core global backbone.

 

Realistically, a complete solution for enterprises includes the existing enterprise data center, cloud-based infrastructure or applications, a back-haul network to tie the two, and then a front-end access network, such as the Internet or a VPN, to reach endpoints such as desktops and mobile devices. 

 

 

Many customers are aware of the fact that, while we are one of the world’s leading telecommunications company, we are also a leader in the hosting space. For those that are not, we have a number of global marketing programs and activities to help get the word out in a variety of key messages: e.g., we are the world’s largest telecommunications company on a revenue basis. In fact, we are uniquely positioned as a leader in telecommunications, hosting, security, and mobile devices, affording us the opportunity to provide end-to-end managed services tying them all together.

 

Businesses are more than receptive, we have a lot of business customers ranging from small firms such as law partnerships up through the largest companies in the world. And, unlike some firms who have been selling cloud services to consumers and have been seeking to enter the enterprise space, we are known for financial stability, SLA commitments, and rock-solid engineering backed by AT&T Labs.

 

 

Our solutions have a variety of advanced security technologies and process certifications that enhance security and help prevent potential unauthorized access, inappropriate use and loss of control of proprietary corporate information and applications. For example, network-based firewalls and anti-DDoS capabilities built into the network protect our customers from intrusions and botnets. For our cloud services, a broad range of technologies, beginning with link encryption for mobile access networks and including VPN services and VLANs to access services, and inherent component security leveraging virtualization technologies are important. From a process certification perspective, we have all the industry leading certifications, e.g., SAS 70 Type II, SysTrust, and a variety of vertical industry focused certifications.

 

We believe that ultimately the customer is responsible for their policy distribution, management, and control. However, we do provide best practices as well as consulting services to ensure dialogue around appropriate policies. From a management and control perspective, we implement customer policies in our virtualized, network-based security services, such as our secure email gateway, network-based firewalls, and web filtering.