AT&T beefs up managed services

Global telco AT&T is ramping up its managed security services portfolio in the Asia Pacific, adding a premises-based managed firewall service for IP networks to its offering with more to come later on.

AT&T said the managed firewall service included day-to-day management, installation of security system components at customer premises, monitoring and ongoing maintenance of networking, firewall servers and software by staff based at the company's global client support centres.

Steve Lowe, vice-president of AT&T's business division in the Asia-Pacific, said customers concerns about network security were growing and suggested they could not get the level of security assurance they needed.

'AT&T has seen increased demand for its integrated solutions capable of managing both network and security on a single platform,' Lowe said.

The new service will be available in Australia, Hong Kong, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan. More countries will be added, the company said.

AT&T would offer the new firewall service in double, triple or quadruple firewall configurations to suit different LANs and public Internet. The service also combined software from Check Point and equipment from Nokia, the company said.

AT&T claimed that an IDC Asia-Pacific survey suggested that 40 percent of IT managers rated network security their main technological concern.

Nearly 40 percent of respondents to the survey said network attack threats had increased in the past year, while 28 percent claimed to have had their network security breached, AT&T said.

AT&T said it believed Asia-Pacific companies would increase their spend on Internet security from eight to 14 percent of total IT spend last year to nine to 17 percent in the next 12 months.

'AT&T anticipates significant business opportunities as the total market for network security services is expected to increase three-fold in Asia Pacific by 2006 to around US$3 billion. The global trend also indicates that spending on network security will triple to an estimated US$23 billion,' the company said.

AT&T claimed to have invested US$300 million investment in its global network and US$200 million in network e-management tools last year and will spend US$500 million in 2003 on customer-related issues such as contract simplification, billing accuracy and provisioning time.