Deutsche Telekom (DT) announced the launch of a Cloud VPN (Virtual Private Network) service for small and medium businesses at the Mobile World Congress on Tuesday. It will be a collaborative venture between DT and Cisco.

The Cloud VPN offering is DT’s first commercial service based on its centralized pan-European IP network. The service was first made available via DT’s subsidiaries in Croatia, Hungary and Slovakia from March 2.

The Cloud VPN service uses a self-service online portal to give customers a simple way to select, subscribe to and activate internet services. The service portfolio includes branch, site-to-site and remote access encrypted VPNs, as well as firewall and web security, all offered as a cloud-managed IT solution for a monthly subscription, said Deutsche Telekom.

The service is built on Cisco virtual security appliances, combined with DT’s OpenStack solutions.

Utilization of Software Defined Networking (SDN), innovative Network Function Virtualization (NFV), multi-vendor orchestration and provisioning technologies, enable service providers to save up to 78 percent in operational costs, deliver a 200 percent return on investment over 5 years and decrease new managed service start-up time to less than 48 hours, compared with past approaches, the companies said in a statement.

“Virtualization and cloud open up new ways to bring enterprise-class IT services within easy reach of SMBs. With the ever-increasing level of security threats, digitization starts with highly secure access, and for that reason, we decided to start the roll-out of our new generation of cloud-managed IT services with Cloud VPN,” said Elias Drakopoulos, senior vice president, Deutsche Telekom.

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