AT&T today announced a new secure cloud storage offer for Federal Government agencies. Synaptic Storage as a Service for Government is a multi-tenant, community solution.

The carrier has built in the same features and policies as its commercial cloud storage service but it’s added other functions to beef up security.

The STaaS storage towers are physically separated from other towers in the data center, government customer data won’t co-exist with commercial data, government customers get a separate cloud portal, and all their users are assigned RSA hard token for 2-Factor Authentication.

AT&T pointed to a MeriTalk survey that says the Federal Government could save $18.9 billion annually with the cloud but only 41 percent of responding agencies are considering working the cloud into the IT strategy.