AT&T and data center company Equinix announced an alliance that seeks to expand adoption of cloud services by offering secure cloud access via AT&T’s virtual private networks (VPNs), instead of the public Internet.
AT&T’s NetBond offering will be embedded in select Equinix data centers in order to allow cloud providers to offer customers access to cloud services via a secure and reliable connection. NetBond combines AT&T VPNs with cloud resources to provide flexible access and dynamically allocates VPN bandwidth so that customers use as much or little as they need.
The capabilities are expected to be available in the first half of this year. Equinix has more than 95 data centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia and a customer base of more than 4,400, including more than 450 cloud services providers.
“The AT&T and Equinix alliance will boost enterprise customers’ confidence in the security, reliability and performance of the cloud,” said Mike Sapien, principal analyst for enterprise at Ovum. “The companies are addressing many of customers’ concerns about moving applications to the cloud and will ultimately speed up enterprise cloud adoption. This is a great example of AT&T’s open network initiatives aligning with Equinix’s cloud ecosystem.”
Jon Summer, senior VP of growth platforms for AT&T Business Solutions, sad that business customers “want rock solid network-based security protecting their traffic and applications when they use cloud services. Virtual private networking gives them better protection against Internet threats while also delivering the reliability, agility and performance they need when accessing the cloud.”
“Equinix sits at the intersection of cloud service providers, network service providers and enterprise customers that want to use those services,” said Pete Hayes, chief sales officer for Equiniz. “The alliance lets AT&T quickly expand its portfolio of AT&T NetBond-enabled cloud services by using our position as a cloud hub.”
The two companies, he added, are “making the network as flexible as the cloud and giving enterprises confidence they can move their most demanding applications to the cloud and still meet their security, scalability and performance requirements.”
