SINGAPORE Telecommunications Limited (SingTel) has announced a first-of-its-kind strategic collaboration with Microsoft Corp to offer enterprise customers access to the latter's Azure public cloud platform. Enterprise customers will soon be able to bypass the public Internet and connect faster and more securely into Azure using SingTel's Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) virtual private network, the telco giant said in a statement. Previously, businesses could only use the Internet to access Microsoft Azure in order to use their enterprise cloud resources. Through this collaboration, SingTel's MPLS network will integrate with the Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute service directly. This connection offers more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security, SingTel claimed.