Orange Business Services (OBS) and content delivery specialist Akamai claim they have worked out a way to give enterprise clients up to 10 times faster access to business critical cloud applications.

The new Business VPN Internet Accelerate service, available from OBS, was created using Akamai’s Cloud Networking technology. It optimizes software as a service (SaaS) access so that users don’t have to wait for cloud-based applications, dashboards and documents to open and save.

This, says OBS, will make their customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and business intelligence activities more potent and productive. The performance improvement is made by tweaking the transport mechanism across the OBS virtual private networks that extend, via an IPSec tunnel, to branch offices in enterprises.

OBS said it improves the cloud user experience through five customer support centres and eight CyberSecurity Operations Centres where it analyses network traffic, constantly configures service levels and monitors security. The Orange business-grade Internet service relies on the global Akamai Intelligent Platform, a content delivery accelerator which has 200,000 servers in 110 countries to localize material. It uses Orange’s global private network of mobile, satellite and wireline access links.

Orange is currently running pilots of Business VPN Internet Accelerate with a number of enterprises. The service is scheduled to be globally available in early 2016.

Getting networks fit for a cloud future with business grade connectivity is vital, said Pierre-Louis Biaggi, OBS’s VP of Connectivity Solutions. “Business VPN Internet Accelerate allows enterprises to embrace global hybrid networks and the Internet,” said Biaggi.

The claim for ten times faster access speeds was based on the results of an Orange Proof-of-Concept between Paris and Singapore. The vendor did not disclose what system was used as a benchmark on which the ten-fold improvement was made.