AT&T Gives Government Agencies Cloud Storage

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AT&T has launched Synaptic Storage as a Service for Government, a multi-tenant community cloud offering that has the same features, policies, capabilities and EMC Atmos technology as its commercial cloud storage solution.

The added twist is a handful of new security measures such as: storage towers that are physically separated from other users’ towers in the data center; separate logical cloud for government data (government customer data will not co-exist with commercial data); a separate cloud portal partition for government agencies; and all government-agency customers and their authorized users are assigned RSA hard token for 2-Factor Authentication.

A recent survey from Meritalk shows that while the federal government could save nearly $19 billion per year by migrating services and applications to the cloud, only 41 percent of the IT-leader respondents said their agency is considering cloud as part of its overall IT strategy. Another 51 percent said they use cloud “only for a limited number of specific applications” and more than half of feds gave their agency a “C” or below on progress toward cloud.

 “Federal agencies want the mobility, collaboration, information sharing and efficiency that cloud offers but they can’t afford to adopt cloud solutions that sacrifice performance, reliability and above all, security,” said Kay Kapoor, president, AT&T Government Solutions. “Our new STaaS for Government offer delivers the key attributes Federal buyers require and allows them to move to the cloud with ease and confidence.”

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