As highlighted by Microsoft at Ignite 2018, the legacy network architectures still common in many organizations often force users of Office 365 cloud services at branch offices to endure sluggish searching in Outlook, extremely long file downloads from Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Microsoft SharePoint Online, audio lag or intermittent dropouts with Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business Online, and other painful performance issues. The main cause of these issues is the excessive latency that results when all Office 365 branch office traffic is backhauled from branch offices to a data center perhaps hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
To optimize the user experience for workers at branch offices, Microsoft is actively promoting its Office 365 Network Connectivity Principles and new APIs. As a close and longtime Microsoft partner, Citrix can offer our mutual customers a modern software-defined networking solution that makes it easy to adopt those principles and optimize the branch office user experience for latency-sensitive Office 365 applications.
Citrix SD-WAN uses the Microsoft REST APIs to instantly identify and categorize the various types of Office 365 traffic. Trusted, latency-sensitive traffic is automatically routed to the nearest Office 365 “front door,” typically within 30 milliseconds of the branch office.
The benefits of using Citrix SD-WAN to manage Office 365 traffic are evident by doing a before-and-after performance comparison of a Teams call, a Microsoft OneDrive download, and a search in Microsoft Exchange Online captured in this brief video:
And configuring Citrix SD-WAN for Office 365 is easy. Policy management can be done either in Microsoft Azure or directly in the SD-WAN console.
There’s no need to tolerate poor connectivity to Office 365 from branch offices. The enhancements in Citrix SD-WAN 10.2 (available now) make it easy to modernize your network architecture without disrupting the MPLS connectivity you already have in place.
Find out more about Citrix SD-WAN for Office 365 on our web site and in our solution brief. Then contact your Citrix solution advisor or service partner to try out Citrix SD-WAN in your environment.
