AT&T Protects SMBs

BEDMINSTER, N.J. -- AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) today announced it is offering two flagship, network-based security services – AT&T Internet ProtectSM and AT&T Intrusion Prevention Service – to small and mid-size businesses. Available today, the services offer these businesses the same best-in-class network protection that is available to large enterprise users.

Now businesses of all sizes can better protect their communications networks from the potentially devastating effects of worms, viruses and distributed denial of services attacks by leveraging the power of AT&T’s predictive intrusion alerting services, which have the added benefit of reducing the complexity and cost of managing customers’ cyber-security programs.

AT&T Internet Protect and AT&T Intrusion Prevention Service form the cornerstone of AT&T’s defense-in-depth strategy, implementing successive layers of defense to help detect and block cyber attacks both at the network’s edge as well as inside the company’s local area network. AT&T believes its more than two million small and mid-size business customers will want the same convenience and cost-effective benefits enterprise customers receive by leveraging the global assets of AT&T into their network security plans. What’s more, providing its security services to a broader base of businesses will position AT&T to capitalize on the growing managed security services market, which Yankee Group estimates will reach more than $4 billion in 2006, growing to $6.8 billion globally by 2010.

By deploying early identification and mitigation capabilities for cyber attacks within its global Internet Protocol (IP) network, AT&T may be able to help prevent these attacks from proliferating and infiltrating a company’s information technology infrastructure – networks, servers, PCs, applications and end-user devices. As a result, these services can assist in the prevention of malicious traffic from wreaking havoc on a customer’s network.

“Businesses of all sizes are searching for ways to detect and neutralize threats to their critical business data,” said William Archer, AT&T vice president of product management. “AT&T Internet Protect and AT&T Intrusion Prevention Service contain threats in the network interior where perimeter solutions can’t, turning the network itself into a front-line security device.

“By expanding the reach of these services to broader markets, we are enabling more businesses to take advantage of the most potent tools against the kind of attacks that have crippled entire networks and brought businesses to a halt,” Archer added.

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T)