To entice the Fortune 1000 to use more clouds, IBM and AT&T have cut a deal to combine resources and deliver a highly secure, supposedly first-of-its-kind “network-enabled” cloud service that uses private networks rather than the public Internet.
The widgetry combines AT&T’s virtual private networking and IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise+ cloud capabilities with what is called “breakthrough” technology from AT&T Labs that creates a fast, new, shared cloud service that’s secure enough to overcome corporate inhibitions about the cloud.
It’ll take them until early next year to get it out.
The pair says that when customers connect to IBM’s IaaS resources over AT&T’s virtual private network, the newfangled technology tightly integrates the security protections of both so customers can quickly and reliably shift information or applications between their own data centers (private clouds) and this new cloud service.