AT&T is teaming up Sungard Availability Services and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer its business customers cloud recovery support.
The managed Cloud Recovery service, which is supported by AWS, cuts down the time it takes for businesses to recover their mission-critical data when disaster strikes their cloud storage and services. According to A&T, the recovery process can be done in four hours or less.
The service also works across hybrid environments, which lets businesses back up combinations of their off-premise and on-premise systems, whether they're virtual or physical, to AWS' cloud.
"Business doesn't stop when disaster strikes," said Josh Goodell, vice president of Intelligent Edge at AT&T Business, in a prepared statement. "Companies need to be able to recover and continue operations ASAP, without pulling resources from other places to get back up and running. This gives them the perfect chance to do just that."
The cloud recovery service can be hands-off for the customer with Sungard Availability Services (AS) handling the implementation, testing, operation, maintenance and monitoring elements of the recovery process. Instead of throwing their own IT support at the recovery process, AT&T's business customers can spend their time focused on their business priorities while tapping into Sungard AS' recovery expertise and investment in AWS-centric replication and orchestrated recovery, tools and resources.
As businesses expand and evolve their cloud strategies, the recovery service is able to scale and provide the same level of service along the way. AT&T said there would be additional cloud support features down the road.
Carriers such as AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink are increasingly partnering with the large cloud providers to stretch their business services, including software-as-a-service, into the cloud while also utilizing the cloud delivery models.
With 5G applications and services starting to ramp up next year, there's an increasing number of endpoints across networks, which means service providers are moving their cloud services closer to the network edge.
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"I see cloud as really evolving over the next probably 12 to 18 months and it's going to be enabled by applications that really have latency sensitivities," Goodell said during his keynote address at last month's MEF18 conference. "I think what we're starting to see is an evolution of cloud infrastructure that gets pushed further out, closer to the customer, closer to the edge endpoints.
"We're no longer thinking about the cloud as a centralized place. There's a need for the cloud to be pushed closer to those endpoints to enable low-latency applications. It's a dynamic we're starting to see and I think it's going to start to accelerate over time."