Ever heard of the saying, “It is not about how fast you go, but how well you go fast”?

That’s what the new Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct service is designed to do — help you build a reliable, rock-solid foundation to achieve always-on, high-performance access to the SaaS applications that drive your business.

Now, let’s discuss your applications that are consumed as SaaS: unified communications/voice and video (UCaaS), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), human capital management (HCM), and virtual desktop applications. You connect to them through a best-effort, public internet connection where latency, jitter, and congestion commonly present quality issues. So, the question becomes: Is your internet service up to the task of delivering high availability and consistent performance for these apps or have user complaints become the bane of your IT team’s existence? Do I hear a long “no”?

Many SD-WAN solutions can offer relief in providing end-to-end or dual-ended on-ramps to your cloud-hosted applications. Citrix SD-WAN, in particular, can connect your enterprise to AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle Cloud in minutes with just a few clicks using your existing internet connections. But what if you need the same level of SD-WAN quality to internet-based applications and services that you don’t control or have reasonable means to dual-end with an SD-WAN appliance?

If you want to find out about how Citrix has developed a solution to address this challenge to help you deliver SaaS more reliably, then read on.

The Easy Button for a Reliable, Enterprise-Grade WAN Service for SaaS

Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct service leverages the internet services already connected to the Citrix SD-WAN appliances at your branch and tunnels business-critical application traffic you select to the Cloud Direct network. The Cloud Direct network ensures that your applications travel over high-speed, low-latency, dedicated paths, peered to over 150 networks and cloud providers, avoiding the public internet as much as possible. Cloud Direct is packaged for easy branch onboarding. Once a license is in place, point-and-click through Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator to select the sites to enable and the applications to redirect to the Cloud Direct service in a matter of minutes, with no truck roll.

Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct Service Network Overview.

Moving on to connectivity and high-availability architecture, Cloud Direct can utilize up to four diverse broadband connections per branch/site. You can even combine a residential or business internet (aka dedicated internet access (DIA)) with mobile broadband or LTE. Those connections are constantly measured for latency, loss, jitter, and congestion, then virtualized and intelligently aggregated into non-encyrpted OpenVPN tunnels that are dual-homed, with the same public IP address, to redundant Cloud Direct gateways (aka PoPs).

If any underlying internet service degrades in performance or goes down, the SD-WAN Cloud Direct service automatically redistributes traffic to the other remaining internet services. If a network region or Cloud Direct gateway becomes unreachable for whatever reason, the service will reroute branch traffic through the backup Cloud Direct gateway, automatically and transparently. With “same IP failover” users and applications often won’t even know something catastrophic had just occurred.

Not enough redundancy? Throw in a second SD-WAN appliance configured in high-availability mode and you will have branch-to-cloud redundancy galore as detailed below:

  • SD-WAN node protection against a scheduled service downtime
  • Branch-to-PoP path-failure protection against accidental fiber cuts and peak-time congestion scenarios
  • Regional gateway or PoP outage protection against the inevitable mistake beyond your control or more serious service disruptions.

If this sounds like a private connectivity service, it’s very close. Thanks to our enterprise-grade private backbone, you will benefit from maximum service uptime, and a detailed report will be provided monthly. But the benefits don’t stop there.

Cloud Apps Benefit from High-Availability

Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct service extends the SD-WAN capability beyond last-mile access and deep into the cloud. For example, it enables brown-out protection against that frustratingly difficult-to-detect peak-hour congestion or path degradation. Cloud Direct also performs intelligent load balancing and automatic QoS to assist latency-sensitive applications, such as UCaaS, with higher performance and service continuity.

In summary, Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct service provides:

  • Access to a fully redundant, high-speed network that’s directly peered to thousands of SaaS platforms and over 150 cloud providers and networks
  • Same IP failover for “hitless” resiliency, which means internet circuit outages don’t affect your applications. Virtual desktop sessions, VPNs, VoIP/video calls, etc., all stay up
  • A turnkey service that deploys in minutes, is centrally managed and offers real-time visibility

Ready for a test drive? Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct service is now supported on the SD-WAN 210, 410, and the new SDN/ NFV-ready 1100 appliances.

Learn more about the Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct service and click on the banner below to listen to our “High Availability SaaS for the Enterprise — Fact or Fiction?” webinar hosted by SDxCentral. And be sure to check out this ONUG blog post on the Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct service from Citrix’s Andrew Leong.

If you already have Citrix SD-WAN and are interested in the Cloud Direct service from our partners, click here.