AT&T Bolsters Business Continuity Services

AT&T is set to announce Wednesday new services to help companies recover crucial information in the event of catastrophes or other unexpected problems.

The Bedminster, N.J.-based telecommunications giant said it has put the business continuity services in place because of recent regulatory and
legislative requirements, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and new accounting rules under the Sarbanes Oxley, which have placed a premium on safeguarding data, particularly financial services and health care sectors.

AT&T joins IBM, HP and SunGuard in the market for business
continuity services.

At the heart of the service is StorageConnect,
which supports networked remote replication, backup and recovery needs, and
AT&T Direct Control, for hosting customers with advanced monitoring service.

StorageConnect offers managed, multi-location storage transport to help customers keep vital information on tap in various places. For example, if
one network is compromised, StorageConnect would pipe storage area network
(SAN) applications between their premises and/or AT&T Internet Data Centers
(IDCs) for safekeeping.

AT&T said StorageConnect Service offers bandwidth speeds from 10 megabits to 1 gigabit per second and supports such storage network technologies as Fiber
Channel, Enterprise System Connection (ESCON) and Fiber Connectivity
(FICON).
StorageConnectSM is designed to be combined with AT&T Ultravailable Storage
and AT&T Ultravailable Network Services, which are managed by AT&T’s
Integrated Global Enterprise Management System (iGEMS) management platform.

“(A)t a time of heightened risk, having
the right reliability, availability, security, and recovery systems is
crucial to an enterprise’s profitability and even survival,” said Zeus Kerravala, vice president,
enterprise computing and networking with research firm The Yankee Group.

AT&T said Direct Control lets users customize warning
and alarm notification and access dashboard views into their network via a Web browser. It also said it allows clients to perform system administration functions such as server reboots, upload software through File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and view and retrieve log files from remote offices. AT&T also offers this service in a hosted version, where Direct Control for Hosting allows clients to access their servers, which are located in AT&T’s Internet data centers.