You’ve been there before. You’re on a video conference call with some of your remote offices, and suddenly, the connection breaks up, jitters, or freezes. You try to reconnect. This can be a frustrating and costly way to work.

As more companies continue to migrate their applications to the cloud, the demand for optimized connectivity across geographical boundaries and locations has increased. This may be your situation, as well. By introducing a cloud-supported, software-defined, virtual WAN into your network, you can provide exceptional connectivity and performance to all branches in your network, wherever they are.

Citrix SD-WAN on Microsoft Azure — a purpose-built, joint virtual WAN solution — makes this enhanced, high-performing connectivity possible and offers a whole new level of operational flexibility. It basically transforms the network to meet the demands of the cloud. Moreover, it helps you deal with network infrastructure complexities encountered when migrating apps to the cloud. This simplified and automated solution can be operated as a do-it-yourself SD-WAN or as a fully managed cloud service that can be deployed from the smallest point-of-sale network to large-scale, branch-office network deployments, including retail outlets and warehouses.

Application-aware Citrix SD-WAN offers optimal connectivity and performance for Office 365. It also provides reliable, low-latency performance for Office 365 collaborative applications, such as Skype and Teams that improves user experience in your branches.

From Improved Performance to Business Continuity

In addition to enhancing performance with the Citrix SD-WAN, a critical capability of the solution helps you maintain business continuity.

It’s likely that your business will have experienced an outage or a system failure at some point. Whether from a natural disaster, a minor disruption, or during an unplanned downtime, without reliable protection your network is vulnerable to risk. It’s not enough to have a business continuity and IT disaster recovery plan to protect your data in the data center. To keep your business running, you also need to ensure server availability and access to your business-critical apps, data, and collaboration tools.

By deploying an SD-WAN to measure latency, jitter, loss, and congestion, your IT can monitor, prioritize, and automatically steer application traffic over the best-performing links in real time to ensure that your apps keep performing as they should.

Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator, a centralized management system, enables you to configure, monitor, and analyze your SD-WAN device. It reduces configuration errors and deployment time for the Citrix SD-WAN. It also integrates with Azure Resource Center to allow automatic information sharing between Azure at the head end and an on-premises SD-WAN device, enabling cohesive policy management with the ability to engage in deep-link usage analytics.

One benefit of aligning your Citrix SD-WAN with Microsoft’s large, global private network within Azure would be the ability to accelerate content and app performance through optimized routing. This provides significant improvement to user experience and workspace productivity.

Another great benefit of deploying a Citrix SD-WAN is that you can purchase it with flexible support and licensing options from the Azure Marketplace. Get started with Citrix SD-WAN on Azure available on Azure Marketplace.