AT&T on multi-cloud strategy and why it’s important for 5G

On the heels of a series of cloud-related announcements, AT&T’s Chris Rice, senior vice president of network cloud and infrastructure, pulled the lens back and explained the company’s larger strategy around cloud computing, automating network management processes and how that relates to 5G. AT&T has regularly benchmarked its virtualization efforts, originally pinned to it’s Domain 2.0 strategy, which evolved to include a network orchestration platform called ECOMP that’s now open source, called ONAP and hosted by the Linux Foundation. Rice, in a recent blog post, said the operator’s “commercial 5G network was the first network born in the cloud,” a move that lowers costs and enhances operational capabilities. AT&T and IBM entered a multi-year agreement that will move AT&T Business’s internal applications into the IBM Cloud. AT&T announced Microsoft as its “preferred cloud provider for non-network applications” wherein the operator’s workforce will use Microsoft 365 apps and “non-network infrastructure” apps go into the Azure cloud.