If you haven’t already noticed, the workspace of tomorrow looks very different from the workspace of 20 years ago. Desktops have given way to laptops, smartphones, and tablets; data is increasingly stored in remote locations and in the cloud, and people can now do work at the times and places most convenient for them.
More and more organizations are switching to a SaaS model for delivering applications, which means that their IT environments are increasingly hybrid and multi-cloud. 81 percent of organizations now have a multi-cloud strategy.These changes present both new opportunities and new difficulties. Companies need to successfully migrate data and applications into these multi-cloud environments and support them with enough bandwidth. At the same time, they must have strategies for high availability and redundancy in order to prevent costly and disruptive outages and downtime.
In light of these challenges, many businesses are turning to SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network) solutions to meet the requirements of a multi-cloud world.
The Benefits of SD-WAN as the fabric for Multi-Cloud
Reliability
Outages can easily disrupt single network links, causing connections to fail at a critical moment. This unpredictability is highly undesirable for companies that want to move more of their operations into the cloud.
According to a 2017 IDC survey conducted for Citrix, 58 percent of organizations believe that better reliability is a “must-have” for application delivery in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. SD-WAN technology can create reliable connections to cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure Cloud directly from the branch office or data center.
Quality of Experience
Unfortunately, many legacy networks aren’t designed to cope with the diversity of network setups that today’s businesses use. As a result, packets are lost, and jitter and latency increase, creating an experience that many users find unacceptable.
SD-WAN makes smarter decisions about how to direct traffic across the network. Through careful analysis, SD-WAN can choose the best path for each application and steer traffic to the right gateway, helping to deliver a high-quality user experience.
Efficiency and Security
SD-WAN is designed from the ground up to prioritize network efficiency. By simplifying the network, SD-WAN drastically slashes the cost of connections. No matter whether you’re connecting branch offices, cloud providers, or on-premises data centers, rest assured that SD-WAN can handle it all behind the scenes.
Security also remains a paramount concern for organizations moving their data and applications into the cloud, and SD-WAN can help assuage those concerns. SD-WAN segregates data based on application or source, and can also restrict access to SaaS applications for certain groups of users.
Moving to the Multi-Cloud: positioning your network for success
With so many SaaS and IaaS offerings on the market, many companies already have relationships with multiple cloud service providers (CSPs). According to research firm IHS Markit, companies used an average of six different CSPs in 2016, with the number expected to rise to 11 as early as next year.
Unfortunately, traditional WANs aren’t always able to handle the complexity of connecting branch offices and on-premises data centers to each separate CSP. SD-WAN is much better suited to handling multi-cloud architectures. Traffic is routed along the most efficient paths, and users can scale up connectivity when they experience extreme demand.
SD-WAN also enables multi-layered security and end-to-end encryption. Data is protected with an integrated firewall at every stage between source and destination. These factors make SD-WAN a crucial element in your organization’s multi-cloud strategy.
Deep dive into SD-WAN for Secure Multi-Cloud with IHS Markit and Citrix
Join Citrix and IHS Markit to learn how SD-WAN can meet the demands of tomorrow’s multi-cloud world in an exclusive on-demand webinar, “From SD-WAN to Secure Multi-Cloud.”
We’ll dive into the important questions surrounding multi-cloud environments and how SD-WAN can help you overcome these inherent challenges.
