When you think of AT&T, you usually think of cell phones, right? AT&T Business is more than just cell towers and connectivity. It provides mobility services such as access to the Internet and your applications, which brings along the need for security.
To learn more about the capabilities of AT&T Business and their latest solution, AT&T Dynamic Defense, Ron Eddings, and Jen Langdon sat down with Senthil Ramakrishnan, Assistant Vice President of Cybersecurity Product at AT&T Business. Senthil and his team are responsible for driving the AT&T Business Cybersecurity Product Portfolio. They work closely with small businesses and enterprise organizations to discover opportunities to help protect their customer's data and infrastructure from threats.
AT&T Dynamic Defense starts at the network, not just your device, making your network the central point of your protection. Think of your business as a house, with your network being the road or driveway leading out of your home. Wouldn’t you rather have strong security and protection at the front gate?
With AT&T Dynamic Defense, Senthil’s team has taken threat detection and mitigation and placed it where the AT&T network meets the internet. Threats can be mitigated before reaching your company’s local area network. This capability helps remove some of the burden and challenges that IT and Security teams experience managing complex firewall rules.
When we asked Senthil why AT&T Business was getting into this space, he spoke about their work with federal agencies and the realization that customers were asking for the same thing: to reduce their threat surface. If AT&T has already started work for the federal agencies, why not also bring it to market?
Traditionally, it would have cost millions of dollars for this kind of update, but we’re entering into a software evolution. By moving away from hardware and monolithic-based networks to a modern, software-driven network, we have an easier way to insert additional security services. Talk about good timing!
Because AT&T Dynamic Defense is software running in the network, there is no need for additional hardware or installation, making it extremely complementary to the rest of your defense solutions. Customers can take advantage of AT&T’s security expertise because when you add AT&T Dynamic Defense, it already has a default policy recommended by AT&T’s Chief Security Office. AT&T Dynamic Defense is available with AT&T Dedicated Internet in select areas.
Smaller businesses can take a zero-touch experience and depend on AT&T’s already-established security policies. As for larger enterprises, the product is scalable and built to be complementary to what your business already has.
When you sign up for the service, you will receive access to the AT&T Dynamic Defense portal. This portal is engineered for simplicity but if you have the expertise, you can write complex access controlled lists through an “advanced” button. The product scales along with the customer, in other words.
Your data isn’t accessed as decisions are made by looking at everything around your data packet. In addition, AT&T has built an AI-driven policy manager that will auto generate a list of policies you can choose to activate.
How do you turn it on? Senthil says it’s all self-service. Once you log in to your AT&T Business profile, you have the option to add AT&T Dynamic Defense, which gives you options for three different packages. These packages are self-explanatory, affordable, and can be up and running in less than thirty minutes. Senthil and his team’s goal was to make AT&T’s connectivity and experience the driver to provide value and security.
If you’re looking to build something dynamic and scalable in the security realm, Senthil says to start thinking about it from day zero. For every step and element in your design, start thinking about how you will secure it at rest or in motion.
Check out the details of AT&T Dynamic Defense here.
This post was sponsored by AT&T Business, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent AT&T Business’s positions or strategies.