We live in a world where users expect secure, reliable, and seamless access to any application, from any device, anywhere, and anytime. This is especially challenging for enterprises with a globally distributed employee foot-print, accessing applications across the datacenter, cloud, and internet. Let’s look at some of the current challenges CIOs the world over are facing and how Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN can help.
With data exploding, video traffic on the rise, and applications getting richer and bandwidth hungry, how do you cope up with these demands without the costs going over the roof?
NetScaler SD-WAN allows enterprises to create one logical WAN network by flexibly bonding together any available underlying network services – MPLS, Broadband Internet, 4G LTE, Satellite etc. This helps achieve a highly resilient virtual WAN connection, with seamless bandwidth aggregation across multiple underlying links and intelligent path selection based on application needs. The flexible transport-agnostic solution helps cost effectively augment bandwidth when needed, with any available WAN connectivity options such as Broadband Internet or 4G LTE.
How do you offer reliable and best-in-class user experience to all your employees for all the business-critical apps?
Well, you only get to control what you measure, and you only get to measure what you see. So, a good first step could be to get visibility into all the applications being accessed.
Application Visibility: Starting with NetScaler SD-WAN software release 9.2, Citrix is launching Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) based application visibility, with the ability to detect over 4,000 applications and sub-applications. The solution employs a variety of pattern matching, session behavior, DNS caching and port-based classification techniques to provide real time layer-7 visibility into all the applications traversing the WAN, including SSL encrypted traffic such as HTTPS, IMAPS etc. NetScaler SD-WAN not only provides visibility into the applications such as Facebook, O365, Oracle and so on, but also into the associated sub-applications such as Facebook Messenger, Facebook Video, O365 Outlook etc.
The solution also provides visibility into the bandwidth consumption of applications, to help make sure that your business-critical apps are not starved of bandwidth. Find a sample ‘Top Applications’ chart below.
Application Availability and Performance: The solution continually monitors the underlying links on a packet-by-packet basis and adapts within a few milliseconds to network degradations or failures, helping achieve “always on” availability for applications. An intelligent path selection mechanism helps pick the best performing paths for the high-priority applications, while the bandwidth aggregation capabilities help make the best use of the entire available capacity to maximize application performance.
How do you prioritize availability of network resources for your business-critical apps, in the event of congestion?
NetScaler SD-WAN supports robust QoS mechanisms to help prioritize your business-critical traffic. The solution offers up to 17 priority traffic classes, broadly categorized into real-time, interactive and bulk traffic. The system intelligently picks default values for applications, but you get to customize QoS, by explicitly mapping applications to one of these traffic classes. The solution also gives you the ability to earmark minimum guaranteed share of bandwidth per traffic class, to help uphold performance of critical applications during congestion.
How do you make sure your business application traffic always has headroom for growth, without running into capacity issues?
NetScaler SD-WAN supports continuous monitoring of bandwidth utilization levels over WAN, with an application-wise break up of bandwidth. So, you get to proactively monitor traffic growth of your critical apps and plan for capacity requirements accordingly. This, coupled with the solution’s ability to flexibly augment bandwidth capacity as needed with any available WAN connectivity mechanism, empowers you to act in a timely manner.
How do you control access to malicious applications or websites?
Starting with NetScaler SD-WAN software release 9.2, Citrix is launching an Application-aware Firewall natively as part of the SD-WAN solution. The Firewall helps blacklist certain applications or application categories, and block the associated traffic on a given branch or across the enterprise network. Subsets of an application such as Facebook Messenger or Video within Facebook.com can also be selectively blocked.
In summary, NetScaler SD-WAN helps you get visibility into, and control over your applications to enable best-in-class application availability, performance and security. Take control of your applications with Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN now!
For more information on NetScaler SD-WAN, go to www.citrix.com/sdwan
