Report: AT&T #1 for Connecting U.S. Businesses' Private Clouds

DALLAS, Sept. 6, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- AT&T* is the leading choice among U.S. businesses for connecting their private clouds according to a study by industry analyst firm Frost & Sullivan.¹

"Based on Frost & Sullivan's independent research, AT&T emerges as the most widely used networking provider for connecting private clouds, demonstrating its early strength in this emerging area," said Lynda Stadtmueller, Program Director, Cloud Computing Services, Frost & Sullivan.

"The Frost & Sullivan research highlights business customer reliance on virtual private networks (VPN) for connecting clouds," said John Potter, Vice President, Hosting, Applications and Cloud Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions.  "Using our VPN capabilities, customers are able to easily and seamlessly connect their private networks directly to virtual machines, the engines of the cloud. This can reduce time and costs associated with provisioning."

"Also, many businesses using our VPN can extend their private clouds into our network-based cloud to create a virtual private cloud. This allows them to complement the security and performance benefits of their private clouds with the cost efficiencies and flexibility of our public cloud capabilities."

Private clouds are clouds that are dedicated to one business, protected behind a firewall, and usually customized.

Frost & Sullivan surveyed 308 U.S. information technology decision-makers and found that nearly half, 48 percent, use AT&T to connect their private clouds: a full eleven percentage points greater than the number two service provider.

The Frost & Sullivan report is the latest in a string of industry accolades affirming AT&T's cloud strategy and portfolio, including:

• AT&T was named a "Champion" for its cloud compute, storage, and platform-as-a-service offers by Info-Tech Research Group. The report also cited AT&T for "solid service geared towards large enterprise users or small and medium enterprises with high security needs" and "extensive experience and vast resources for hosted services."²
• Research firm Heavy Reading confirmed AT&T's status as the first telecommunications provider with a platform-as-a-service cloud offer. The report noted the enterprise grade security, availability and service level commitments associated with the offer as well as its rich set of features and templates for application development and management.³
• Current Analysis, in a recent report focused on data centers and cloud services, commended AT&T on several facets of its cloud services including: "a strong network-based data center services solution set that includes some very innovative capabilities around intelligent content distribution and resiliency"; "hosting service level agreements that are impressive"; "a strong story on the managed applications front"; a deepened cloud catalog that includes offers for both enterprise and independent cloud application developers; and "a solid set of hosting solutions for healthcare clients, including  its cloud-based Medical Image and Information Management (MiiM) solution."⁴

AT&T markets a wide range of cloud and managed hosting solutions for businesses including:

• Compute and storage offers
• A virtual private cloud offer that allows users to easily and flexibly shift computing workloads between their private clouds and AT&T's network-based cloud
• Platform as a service for enterprise developers
• A developer-centric cloud for independent developers and web-centric businesses who want quick access to low-cost compute and application development capabilities.

The company also provides cloud-based solutions for the healthcare industry, including a healthcare information exchange offer and a medical image access and archive solution.

¹ Frost & Sullivan, 2012 Best Practices Award, United States Cloud Computing study www.frost.com

² Info-Tech Research Group, "Vendor Landscape: Cloud Infrastructure as a Service," July 2012

³ Heavy Reading, "Enterprise PaaS: What's In It for Telcos?" Vol. 8, No.2, June 2012

⁴ Current Analysis, Data Center and Cloud Services Report, May 2012

*AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand and not by AT&T Inc.

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