“Security controls are moving from localized to cloud based”

Brief us about the key areas managed security expert has to deal with business from various sectors.

Across the board, the distinction between mobile devices and conventional PCs in enterprise ecosystems has become less clear. The dependence on mobility is growing at a tremendous rate and attracting attackers to devices, services and underlying infrastructure.

In the fully evolved mobility architecture, security controls are moving from localized user managed toward Cloud-based corporate managed. Customers from all industries are looking to us for help with device protection, MDM capabilities, network-based security controls, and secure transport of data across mobile networks and cloud infrastructure.

How the increasing trend towards managed services could increase security risks?

As businesses move away from the traditional PC-centric model and adopt new mobile and cloud-based services, their cyber security and IT groups are tasked with managing and securing an influx of new connections on the corporate network.

Of particularly importance are the many types of attacks emerging in the mobile ecosystem that can only be stopped via real-time policing and filtering by the service provider under an explicit security service level agreement.

Partnering with an MSSP can also help businesses compensate for the lack of internal security expertise and help keep their organization ahead of the changing landscape. At AT&T, we see a trend toward cloud-based services due to their advantage of simplicity, no required capital expense, ease of maintenance and access to AT&T security experts.

AT&T, with Project VIP, plans to spend $14 billion on wireless and wireline initiatives. Briefly explain how and why?

Project VIP supports growing demand for high-speed IP broadband as well as new mobile, app and cloud services. We plan to expand our 4G LTE network to cover 300 million Americans by the end of 2014. In addition to adding 10,000 new macro network sites, such as cell towers, over the investment period, we plan to make big plays with transformative technology that brings our network to more places and in new ways.

As part of this initiative, we plan to add 40,000 small cells in neighborhoods, cities - even indoors - over the next 3 years.

We also plan to add more than 1,000 Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS). We've seen how DAS is making a big difference in how people experience events, with access to a robust high-speed network.

Project VIP rolls out new technologies across wireless and wire-line networks to deliver new network capacity, connections, and speed.

IBM-AT&T recently partnered to launch private cloud for enterprises. What has been AT&T's notable feature w.r.t security in this partnership?

We are working with IBM to deliver a secure, first-of-its-kind "network-enabled" cloud service to Fortune 1000 customers in early 2013. This new service is a multi-user cloud delivered with the security, reliability and performance attributes of a private cloud.

The service combines AT&T virtual private networking and IBM's Smart Cloud Enterprise+ cloud capabilities with breakthrough ‘cloud network enablement' technology from AT&T Labs to create a new highly-secure cloud service that uses private networks rather than the public Internet - which can be vulnerable to attacks, outages and other risks.

Our technology tightly integrates the security protections of our virtual private network and IBM's cloud infrastructure. This allows customers to quickly and reliably shift cloud workloads between the private clouds in their datacenters (private clouds) and IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise+.