Telecommunications service provider AAPT is now offering medium to large enterprise customers cloud services following the expansion of its 10-year partnership with NetApp.
According to AAPT CEO David Yuile, customers have access to high speed cloud-based services, underpinned by the carrier’s network, which offer lower costs and greater flexibility than on-premise IT services.
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He added that it expects many of the customers for its cloud services will be organisations wanting to supplement their existing NetApp storage with an off-site offering.
“[AAPT] customers will also be able to access the security and disaster recovery benefits of NetApp’s products and the security features of AAPT’s network, at any scale,” Yuile said.
“We’re now seeing customers want dedicated storage but don’t have the skills to manage it so we’re looking to offer managed services where customer data will be housed in one of our six data centres.”
AAPT’s data centres are based in Sydney and Melbourne. It also makes use of third party data centres operated by Global Switch and Polaris.
“We’ve been re-factoring our data centres so we can deploy some of the [NetApp] technology in there and leverage it as part of our network offering,” Yuile said. “The idea is that when you have storage in a data centre, you need high speed connectivity to it and that is a big part of our business as a telco.”
Security
Turning to the attack by hackitvists associated with Anonymous in July 2012, which affected some historical AAPT sales data stored on servers in Melbourne, Yuile said the company had undertaken a review of its data retention policy.
“The review included a full assessment of where our data is kept and we’ve moved all of that data inside the AAPT network,” he said.
“We’ve also written to the small number of customers who were affected by it and worked with our security people to review our procedures and processes,” he said.
Yuile pointed out that at no point in time during the incident was AAPT’s network breached.
“We take these incidents very seriously and our customers were very understanding when we explained to them what happened,” he said.
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