IT departments will be a thing of the past for the vast majority of organizations in the world as the reliability of cloud computing increases. The upkeep for an IT department takes a pretty big bite of an organization’s budget and the elimination of the department will only be missed by a handful of people. In order to talk companies into getting rid of their IT department cloud service providers have to be reliable. In a study conducted by Frost & Sullivan, AT&T (News - Alert) was ranked as the most popular private cloud networking provider.

The survey was conducted by asking key technology decision makers for 308 organizations and 48 percent of the participants said they used AT&T to connect their private clouds. The nearest competitor is 11 percent lower than AT&T. A private cloud is a customized database dedicated to one business which is protected behind a firewall.


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"Based on Frost & Sullivan's (News - Alert) independent research, AT&T emerges as the most widely used networking provider for connecting private clouds, demonstrating its early strength in this emerging area," said Lynda Stadtmueller, Program Director, Cloud Computing Services, Frost & Sullivan.

By taking a leading role in this technology, AT&T is poised to capture a large share of what many experts predict to be the future in computing. The company offers a wide range of cloud and managed hosting solutions. The service is scalable to address the needs of different size organizations giving the user the ability of shifting workloads between private clouds and the network based cloud of AT&T. This flexibility allows different platforms to use the system with low cost computing and application development.

"The Frost & Sullivan research highlights business customer reliance on virtual private networks (VPN) for connecting clouds," said John Potter, VP, Hosting, Applications and Cloud Solutions,   "Using our VPN capabilities, customers are able to easily and seamlessly connect their private networks directly to virtual machines, the engines of the cloud. This can reduce time and costs associated with provisioning."

Cloud computing gives organizations a stable department in their organization no matter what kind of instability the company is going through. This is one of the greatest benefits of this service. Your digital assets will be protected and available whether you are in your office or any other location. The expense of fixed assets is no longer a viable solution for companies. Virtualization, private networks and cloud services can offer the same service at a fraction of the cost of maintaining your own equipment.

Mr. Potter added “Many businesses using our VPN can extend their private clouds into our network-based cloud to create a virtual private cloud. This allows them to complement the security and performance benefits of their private clouds with the cost efficiencies and flexibility of our public cloud capabilities."

The scalability of cloud services is its greatest asset; as an organization you can scale up or down your capacity according to your demand. The savings to your capital investment can be substantial depending on the size of your organization.

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