AT&T Designs a Cloud-based Storage Solution for Federal Agencies

As more and more companies look to the cloud for their data storage needs, AT&T (News - Alert) has launched Synaptic Storage as a Service for Government so that federal agencies can reap the benefits of the cloud while ensuring that security still remains a top priority.

The cloud-based storage solution has all the same features, policies, capabilities and EMC (News - Alert) Atmos technology offered by AT&T's commercial cloud storage, in addition to numerous measures needed to meet the robust security requirements of federal government agencies.

Some of these security measures include storage towers that are physically separated from other users' towers in the data center, separate logical cloud for government data to ensure that data from government customers will never co-exist with commercial data, a separate cloud portal partition for government agencies, and two-factor authentication with an RSA (News - Alert) hard token for all government agency customers and their authorized users.

"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," Kay Kapoor, president of AT&T Government Solutions, said in a statement. "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."

The introduction of the new cloud storage solution for federal agencies comes as a new MeriTalk survey revealed that the federal government could save $18.9 billion each year by moving services and applications to the cloud.

Despite this revelation, only 41 percent of those surveyed said that their agency is considering cloud as part of their overall IT strategy and approximately half said they use cloud for only a limited number of specific applications. The majority of feds also gave their agency a C-grade or below on progress toward cloud and 44 percent of feds said that they believe their agency is missing out on potential savings by using private clouds rather than public, hybrid or community ones.