Imagine that we live in a world with a single capital city. Let’s call it “Kings Landing.” Kings Landing is surrounded by multiple remote cities, and the only way to travel between these cities are six-lane highways that connect them all together.

Most of our friends and family live in Kings Landing, which is the most popular city to visit. I can load my family in my spacious car and drive to any city without traffic congestion, traffic lights or great walls holding me up. I don’t need maps because I only have one way to get there. Life is so simple. And if I want to travel to different city, I just need to go to Kings Landing first, and from there I can find an easy way to get to my destination.

Unfortunately for us this world is not a reality. We live in a world where we have 195 countries, scattered over seven continents, and thousands of cities people want to travel to. They want choices on how to move between different cities — car, plane, boat. They want to be able to make informed decisions on how far a destination is, how long it will take to get there, and if there are any obstacles that will affect their travel time.

The world is changing, and we need to adapt our networks to do the same.

Companies are embracing the cloud, and with the drive for cloud transformation, whether in a public cloud, private cloud, or as a service, comes new networking requirements. This new “Work from Anywhere” world requires an application-centric hybrid WAN network, powered by Citrix SD-WAN, that supports any type of connectivity, agnostic of provider and location. In our world, we have companies like Microsoft whose WAN network is one of the biggest in the world. Citrix SD-WAN uses their low-latency backhaul network to create multiple paths between remote sites.

At the same time companies are moving to Office 365 at a rate never seen before. Traditional networks are not built and designed for O365 adoption, and companies still route O365 traffic out via their data center. Citrix partners with Microsoft to enable our Citrix SD-WAN to route O365 traffic direct from the remote site to the closest Microsoft Front Door service to optimize user experience.

In our world we’ve embraced the future. Come and see what the it looks like. Watch the video below to see the future of WAN networking from a customer’s perspective.