During the Mobile World Congress last week, Deutsche Telekom (DT), in collaboration with Cisco, launched the Cloud VPN (Virtual Private Network) Service for small and medium businesses. The Cloud VPN offering is DT’s first commercial service based on its centralized Pan-European IP network, serving its subsidiaries in Croatia, Hungary and Slovakia. 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 on a monthly subscription basis.
The Cloud VPN service uses a self-service online portal to give customers a simple way to select, subscribe to and activate highly secure and scalable Internet services. Customers have access to a management dashboard on which they can track the status and performance of services and upgrade their service package, such as increasing the number of users or the bandwidth, with a click of a mouse.
The virtualized managed service, which is built on Cisco's virtual security appliances and combined with DT’s OpenStack solutions, utilizes Cisco's Tail-F NCS platform and is fully based on Netconf/YANG, which are the emerging global standards for this type of virtualized services within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The digitization of the SMB sector is key to economic growth across Europe. 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.
Michael Ganser, SVP, Central Europe, Cisco
As cited in the Cisco Annual Security Report, cybersecurity attacks are now much more sophisticated, which makes it challenging for SMBs to safeguard their IT infrastructure. The Cloud VPN service is addressing these demanding security requirements, as well as regulatory and compliance requirements, in a cost-effective manner.
