AT&T says NetBond technology drives hybrid cloud adoption

AT&T (NYSE: T) says that its NetBond technology is driving an array of businesses, ranging from large businesses and small to medium businesses (SMBs) to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. 

As a computing environment which uses a mix of on-premise, private cloud and public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms, NetBond works by bonding networking and computing resources together and automates functions that are often performed manually.

Rene Dufrene, AVP product marketing at AT&T, told FierceTelecom it is seeing demand from a number of business customer segments that leverage a diversity of cloud services from either AT&T or other partners like CSC or Amazon Web Services.

"We're seeing demand and up and down market," Dufrene said. "I think the qualifier there is if you're a client using multiple clouds in a significant manner and we have some customers that standardize or semi-standardize on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to develop new applications that stay in that cloud service."

SMBs, in particular, represent an untapped opportunity for large carriers like AT&T. According to a recent BCSG study, 43 percent of all UK and U.S. SMB respondents said that they would be willing to purchase cloud services from their incumbent service provider.

Dufrene said the hybrid service provides a mix of economic advantages and various functions not available with traditional network solutions. 

"If you're doing a lot of business in the cloud, whether it's one or multiple, it's a great tool or if you're doing a lot of bursting into the cloud," Dufrene said. "It's also a great economic and functionality advantage for you to leverage agility bundled in with NetBond to manage those workloads that require a higher secure integrated network service."

Like other service providers AT&T has been developing an ecosystem that encourages its business customers to bring their existing cloud services to the party. The service provider recently enhanced its partnership with CSC to assist customers in managing workloads across hybrid cloud network environments.

Adopting a hybrid cloud service also plays into the security concerns that many businesses have in adopting cloud services.

Dufrene says that using a hybrid cloud that includes NetBond gives business customers the flexibility to migrate into the cloud, while ensuring security.

"Not only does NetBond provide them a way to connect to multiple cloud services in an off-Internet managed manner, but it also gives them value-added performance benefits as well," Dufrene said. "It's a combination of security as well as performance that will make it easier for our customers to migrate to the cloud with confidence."

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