AT&T Launches Managed Firewall Service for Small and Midsized Businesses

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) has announced an enhancement to its Managed Firewall portfolio with the release of a Premises — Based Cisco ASA® Option. This newest offering in the AT&T managed security services portfolio has been developed for customers of all sizes and has ideal features for small and midsized businesses.

The AT&T Premises — Based Cisco ASA® Firewall Option combines AT&T’s firewall software solutions with scalable, end-to-end management, monitoring and maintenance to help customers better protect their internet infrastructure. The customer can locate services such as those for Web access and electronic mail in the protected network and can control access to those servers.

The service is available through the AT&T BusinessDirect® Web portal, which provides a single point to manage the customer’s perimeter. The fully managed firewall service makes enforcement of customer’s security policy an inherent part of the network across Intranet-, Extranet-, and Internet-based communications. The AT&T Premises — Based Cisco ASA Firewall Option is available bundled with AT&T’s Managed Internet Service or as a stand alone service to use on any internet service provider’s connection.

“The AT&T Managed Firewall Service — Cisco ASA Option has been developed for small and midsized businesses that require dedicated firewall appliances to protect their network, while also providing outbound connections and reliable Internet access,” said John Regan, vice president of Small Business Segment Marketing for AT&T. “This newest offer is the latest example of how we’ve taken security capabilities and expertise normally targeted to large enterprises and developed an easy, low-cost solution tailored to the needs of this market segment.”

According to a Forrester Research survey of 834 customers focusing on IT spending for small and medium-sized businesses (2007 SMB IT Budget Outlook: North America, Feb. 7, 2007), 36 percent of respondents plan to spend more on security software in 2007 compared with 2006.1

“We are extremely pleased to build on our long-standing relationship with AT&T to help further its capabilities in managed security services delivery,” said Al Safarikas, senior director of marketing at Cisco. “Both the demand for managed business services and the recognition of the need for protected systems are increasing. Customer-focused providers such as AT&T are leading the way toward truly making the network the platform for the way we work, and enabling business customers to stay focused on their core businesses by outsourcing important but complex network capabilities.”

AT&T’s enterprise security portfolio is focused on providing managed security services to help remove the dependency on hardware and software while supporting a defense in depth architecture with security features built into multiple network layers and supporting processes.

AT&T combines the expertise of its security experts and uses the scale and reliability of its global Internet Protocol (IP) network to deliver technologies and solutions tailored to the needs of small to midsized businesses. Over the past several months, AT&T has introduced a number of managed security services to the small and midsized business segment that were previously available only to enterprise businesses. Some of these services include:

AT&T Internet Protect®. This service is designed to help predict and profile identified malicious activities before they occur, including such information as top 10 vulnerabilities, recent patch releases and other need-to-know facts.
Intrusion Prevention. This service helps detect, contain and neutralize known threats from hackers, viruses and worms that could attack everything from servers to PDAs and reduce uptime and damage valuable data.
DDoS Defense. This service helps provide Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack identification and mitigation within AT&T’s backbone providing the customer with increased protection from malicious traffic before it reaches their network.
AT&T delivers a suite of Security and Business Continuity Services to help assess vulnerabilities, protect infrastructure, help detect attacks, respond to suspicious activities and events and design enterprise networking environments for nonstop operations. More information on AT&T security offerings can be found at www.business.att.com/security.