Under the Internet Protect service, AT&T will alert businesses through a secure Web portal to potential threats within minutes of identifying critical malicious activity. The Bedminster, N.J., vendor recently formed a team of 350 security analysts to identify and pinpoint potential worms, viruses, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and other threats.
The service will be based on a standard Service Level Agreement. If AT&T fails to notify a customer of a network-based Denial of Service (DoS) attack before the customer reports it to AT&T, the customer will be credited charges for the month's service, Shepcaro said.
With the AT&T Personal Firewall, the carrier will offer business customers policy compliance services for firewall, anti-virus, and software patch management. Based upon the Zone Labs Integrity software from Zone Labs, San Francisco, the service automatically blocks security threats by proactively protecting remote employee workstations, and centralizes management tools for the control of all remote network endpoints.
Paul Weinstein, vice president of strategic alliances at Zone Labs, said the service also gives customers control over applications operating on employee machines. "Customers want to deploy this kind of endpoint security, but they don't have the resources," he said. "If AT&T can duplicate the success they've had in the managed VPN business, this will be huge."
The AT&T Personal Firewall was expected to be available immediately to channel partners with customers of AT&T's Virtual Tunnel Service (AVTS), Broadband Single User VPN service, and Business Internet Service (BIS) service.
