AT&T Offers More Cloud Space
One of the great things about cloud computing is its “pay for what you need” model. In these difficult economic times, that’s a huge appeal for cost-conscious companies.
And it seems that, more and more, cloud service providers are recognizing that appeal. For example, AT&T recently said it will unveil a product by year’s end called Synaptic Compute as a Service, which lets businesses buy more computing capacity when they need it.
According to a story about the offering on Cnet.com, AT&T designed it to enable IT people to store and maintain internal applications and data via AT&T’s cloud. “Capacity and availability can be ramped up when needed, especially if a company’s own data center resources become taxed,” AT&T said in the story.
“The service is designed is to help businesses save money by not having to maintain full network capacity year-round if demand only shoots up during certain times of the year,” according to the story.
One other development that caught my eye here: With Synaptic Compute, AT&T’s customers can seamlessly access software and content they need – whether stored internally or on AT&T’s network cloud.
That ability to help companies who have one foot in its internal servers and another out on the cloud is tremendously valuable. I think this is a huge differentiator for cloud services companies these days.
Take monitoring services. Some firms can only monitor and report on transactions, servers , networks, databases and other metrics over companies’ internal servers. Others, like our company, have the ability to be a watchdog for companies on both their internal servers and cloud-based infrastructure.