Our customers tell us that Citrix SD-WAN provides reliable, cost-effective, uninterrupted connectivity and optimal performance. And it’s easy to deploy. Let’s take a look at some of the use cases for which our customers chose Citrix SD-WAN.

A More Secure WAN

Not only do we provide data protection over the overlay network with encryption, but an integrated multi-zone stateful firewall ensures customers in industries such as retail, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing can adhere to their security requirements with fewer appliances in the branch. The firewall enables customers to identify apps and apply polices (allow, drop, reject, or log) to each virtual-routing domain (e.g., third-party contractors on a VLAN don’t have access, but employees do). You can limit which apps are available by zone (e.g., users in a branch and third-party contractors can’t access financial apps). This branch firewall can replace a separate firewall while enabling direct internet breakout from branches.

Because a lot of your traffic might be internet-bound, you’ll want to secure it without having to backhaul it to your data center or maintain costly security stacks in your branches. We can direct traffic to a next-gen firewall service such as Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler. This centralized approach provides secure local breakout with advanced threat protection and a better user experience in the branch for critical SaaS and cloud apps. It also reduces the cost and complexity of deploying and managing security appliances in the branches.

Eliminate the Impact of Brownouts and Outages

It’s surprising how often WAN services degrade or fail, and the impact to your business when they do can be disastrous. This can result in lost revenue, frustrated customers, and unproductive employees. Voice and video are critical to many customer service and other types of businesses and require a high-performing network without disruptions to eliminate audio drop-outs, robotic voice, and disappointing video quality.

If a link goes out, SD-WAN can detect it within milliseconds, resulting in almost instantaneous resiliency. This means calls and applications aren’t dropped, and users don’t even notice a glitch. Even if there’s not a full outage, SD-WAN can detect brownouts such as high latency or loss spikes and shift to a better performing WAN service in real time.

Automate Your WAN to Accelerate the Move to Cloud

SD-WAN can fulfill a number of tick boxes in your journey to the cloud. Whether it’s Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure, AWS, or others, SD-WAN can ensure your network is ready to move to the cloud.

In support of Office 365 Connectivity Principles, Citrix SD-WAN provides reliable connections directly from branches to the nearest Office 365 edge nodes, dramatically improving user experience compared to backhauling to the data center. The Office 365 Endpoints web service publication provides Office 365 endpoint URLs and IP addresses. With support for new Microsoft APIs, Citrix SD-WAN uses the endpoint data to enable direct routing of Internet traffic from the branch to Office 365 edge nodes. SD-WAN’s traffic steering and monitoring capabilities provide Office 365 detection on the first packet to enable immediate local egress. Teams/Skype for Business Online audio and video is processed locally and best suited for local egress from the branch to the nearest Office 365 front door.

Moving workloads to Azure? Citrix SD-WAN has integrated with Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN from the onset of their public preview, drastically speeding network deployments on a large scale with API integration and template-based cloning. Read more.

If you’re moving workloads to AWS, Citrix makes it simple to connect your branches to AWS seamlessly while alleviating concerns around application performance and reliable connectivity. Available in the AWS Marketplace, Citrix SD-WAN simplifies the management and operations of your network by treating it as code, supports CloudWatch metrics, and connects to Amazon VPC for sharing of on-premises data. Learn more.

Improved Network Stability and Performance for Virtual Apps and Desktops

The network is a critical component of the virtual app and desktop experience in a geographically dispersed enterprise. Imagine being able to ensure your HDX traffic always has sufficient bandwidth and goes over the best path possible and to ensure high-res monitors, hi-def video and file syncing don’t bog down your network.

SD-WAN offers a unique look into the quality of experience of virtual app and desktop users in branches, enabling you to get a deep understanding of end-to-end latencies and other network conditions whether connecting to an on-premises data center or the cloud. Only Citrix SD-WAN fully understands the HDX/ICA protocol, enabling unique and powerful capabilities like HDX Fair Sharing and HDX AutoQoS over a single port. When SD-WAN is deployed in conjunction with Citrix Gateway, you can use HDX Insight to determine WAN latency between a branch and the data center providing proactive monitoring of the network in real-time for fast troubleshooting.

Get started with a free SD-WAN trial today.