AT&T Introduces New AT&T NetBond Feature

AT&T is leveraging its cloud networking solution known as AT&T NetBond with a view to smoothening connections among multiple cloud platforms in order to provide improved cloud services. The solution is expected to allow business customers to efficiently share work between the various cloud platforms over a network connection that is private and highly secure.

In recent years linking multiple cloud platforms has gained importance as business organizations begin moving more applications, systems and data to the cloud. This is because enterprises have taken to using a couple of clouds and these could be public, hybrid or private clouds or a combination. Thus the applications of these enterprises have to interact across various clouds. With the AT&T NetBond businesses now have access to a scalable network connectivity which allows for efficient traffic and data flow between the various clouds in any ecosystem.

More control

AT&T’s cloud portal also allows businesses to have more control over the connections between the clouds. Businesses are also able to save time which would be otherwise wasted trying to create connection points individually among the various cloud providers. This solution now makes it possible for businesses to change or create the connectivity configurations in a matter of minutes. Since the model is pay-as-you-go, customers will be able to increase the bandwidth depending on the requirements with AT&T NetBond.

The cloud ecosystem of AT&T NetBond currently boasts of 20 members who are able to provide access that is highly secure to cloud services numbering over 130. Some of the cloud platform partners that AT&T NetBond is working with include FastConnect from Oracle Network Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Equinix and Amazon Web Services.

More efficiency

Before the introduction of the new feature whenever customers needed to connect two clouds, they had to go through a process which involved pulling information from the storage cloud, send it to the data center before sending it again to the compute cloud.

“Before this announcement, a customer would have to buy two NetBond connections … [Now] you buy one NetBond connection and go cloud to cloud all within the bandwidth considerations of that first cloud connection,” said AT&T’s enterprise networking vice president, Rosa Maria Boza in an interview with FierceTelecom.

The new AT&T NetBond feature coincides with a new iPhone offer by the telecommunications giant that comes in the wake of the iPhone X launch. The offer will see customers getting a free iPhone after buying one subject to the fulfilment of certain conditions.