AT&T enhances cloud services

Several new cloud service capabilities announced by AT&T this week are based on the idea that “the cloud is an evolution of the network,” AT&T Vice President of Hosting and Cloud Services Steve Caniano told Connected Planet.

For example, enhancements to AT&T’s Synaptic Compute as a Service offering lets customers use an AT&T virtual private network to create what Caniano called a “virtual private cloud.”

Cloud services from some other cloud providers run over the Internet and communications services are simply used as an access link, Caniano said. But with the new AT&T offering, he said, “We’re talking about a tighter integration.”

Essentially, he said, “we’re trying to allow customers to extend a private cloud through the network—they can have what they need in their own data centers, but through the network can distribute [applications] to other locations for performance reasons or resiliency or to distribute the application.”

Storage service enhancements

Another new offering allows mobile users to move data to and from the AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service cloud using mobile devices.
“Customers want to mobilize every application, whether it’s a mobile [sales] force or an [individual] mobile user or a partner base,” said Caniano.

In addition, AT&T announced that it has invited third party developers and vendors to create software or applications that build on AT&T’s Synaptic Storage as a Service capabilities.

“What we found with many customers is that more than buying infrastructure capabilities such as storage, they want to buy solutions,” Caniano said.

CommVault, for example, has integrated its technology so that a user can “dynamically direct data across our network into our cloud” to automate the data backup function, Caniano explained.

“Users can set policies with the backup solution they already use and have it dynamically routed across based on [conditions] such as ‘The data has aged 60 days,’” said Caniano.