It’s finally fall – the air is cooler, football season is in full swing (as mentioned in a previous blog post by yours truly), and conferences and tradeshows have kicked back up.

That’s all good news for me. I am thrilled that the humidity has broken; I love to spend Sunday afternoons watching football; and one of my favorite things about my job is representing the company at tradeshows and conferences.  Lately, though, as I work in our booths at these events, I’m amazed by the number of people who don’t know that AT&T is in the cloud business.

To me, our cloud makes perfect sense. The cloud, which is essentially on-demand IT infrastructure, is only as good as the network that connects you to it. Without reliable connectivity, your data and applications would be trapped there, inaccessible.

Leonardo da Vinci once said, “The air moves like a river and carries the clouds with it; just as running water carries all the things that float upon it.” I think the network works very much in the same way for the IT cloud as the air works for clouds in da Vinci’s quote – carrying the cloud to you and bringing your data to it.

We have architected our cloud to be different – It is part of the network. That means the cloud and the network work together as one. Much like logs float downriver to reach their destinations quickly and smoothly, information flows through the network and the cloud, following a defined path that keeps it safe and ensures its integrity.

There are alternatives to this holistic approach to cloud. You could buy your cloud infrastructure and your network separately and integrate them yourself. One of our networking experts recently explained to me that if you were to do that, latency would increase  by 50% and availability would be reduced by three times. Oh, and your costs would increase because you’d need to invest in some network infrastructure that you’d then have to manage.

I think that’s pretty compelling. What do you think?

If you are attending Cloud Expo West in Santa Clara November 5-8, let me know. I’d love to meet up with you. Or stop by the AT&T booth. We can chat about Leonardo, the cloud, and the air in your network.