AT&T dips toe in content pool

AT&T’s new 24-hour security news channel could be a sign of content to come.

The Web-based service, initially available exclusively to subscribers of AT&T Internet Protect, the company’s alerting and monitoring service, could become more of a commercial enterprise of its own, according to Ed Amoroso, vice president and chief security officer at AT&T.

“It could become a commercial product – we are looking very closely at that,” he said. “We look to our customers to guide the kind of content that makes sense. We will also look carefully to see what a broader market might be interested in using. We also are looking closely in the new AT&T Inc. in broadband and IPTV world. There is a lot of very exciting and potential directions for us around the corner.”

The video service, which is produced in AT&T’s own TV studio at its Bedminster, N.J. network operations center in partnership with AT&T’s PR department, grew out of requests from enterprise system administrators for more information than AT&T was providing in its security alerts.

“We were paging the system administrators that we work with at our enterprise customers, and telling them that something is going on – like new virus or a worm,” Amoroso said in a telephone interview. “Then they’d go off and look at our portal, where we’d have streaming information. The feedback from the system administrators was that they wanted more.”

The “more” that AT&T is delivering adds a bit of entertainment value to an information and education service, delivering regular security updates throughout the day but also lectures, interviews, training programs and daily newscasts. The content is tailored to the audience, he added, assuming a certain degree of technical knowledge.

“Every hour we will give them an update with any new information as well as progress on alerts, and traffic they should be watching out for that might correlate to vulnerabilities within Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Oracle or other systems,” Amoroso said. “We’ve also built the equivalent of a small university’s worth of ongoing lecture series. They might tune in to hear someone from AT&T Labs talking about new trends in content distribution.”

The goal is to “more tightly bond with our customers,” he said, while playing down the role of AT&T Internet Security News Network in attracting or retaining customers. The value to enterprise network managers is in getting real-time information about network threats that isn’t available today, Amoroso added.

“It can calm security managers down, and create a community of people who are defending the system,” he said.