Citrix SD-WAN provides more value in its simplicity
Being world-class requires many attributes come together, which result in a much simpler experience. That is our story – delivering superb experience with high security and reliability with Citrix SD-WAN.
Before we get into it, we need to ask the question, “Whats-up with this SD-WAN market?” Nearly 50-some-odd vendors are claiming some ground in the crowded software-defined WAN Edge space, and more new ones are seen as “edging” their way into this market as the year comes to a close. Edging or scrambling? You decide. Vendors who don’t really offer SD-WAN in the true sense, but for a few basic capabilities, are re-positioning themselves just to get noticed or grab your attention, which just adds to the chaos when trying to find the right fit for your business. Talk about getting desperate; some vendors will sneak in just to be heard (if not seen) at the boundary wall of this market!
And, it is not just about what we think — even Gartner made the effort to finely trim the over-crowded space down to 20 select vendors, including Citrix, for a closer evaluation. It is worth noting that Citrix’s placement in their evaluation demonstrates our sustained execution in the marketplace with clear, long-term viability in all the markets that we serve. Citrix is seen as a trusted partner for global customers in the healthcare, finance, manufacturing and retail segments wherein businesses deploy Citrix SD-WAN as the reliable and preferred solution to balance their high expectations of experience, security, and choice.
With respect to experience, the two-fold Citrix SD-WAN approach is designed to significantly improve the workspace experience for productivity, and task users together with simplifying provisioning and day-to-day management for IT and networking professionals. For example, Office 365 users in a branch will see superior performance regardless of the location of that branch. This is because Citrix has partnered with Microsoft to support direct and fast egress to the Office 365 cloud services right out of the box. Your remote branch users will clearly see the difference in performance — it will be much better than before. On the back-end, Citrix SD-WAN provides deep visibility into the quality of experience (QoE) in the branch through a simple, easy-to-use management tool. Zero-touch deployment (ZTD) quickly adds new Citrix SD-WAN appliances to your networkand simplifies hybrid and multi-cloud deployments including on Amazon’s AWS. Citrix ensures a richer IT experience in addition to best-in-class user experience.
As customers move to the cloud, Citrix SD-WAN helps by securely enabling local branch-to-internet breakouts through a built-in stateful firewall. Citrix SD-WAN is recognized as a robust solution for branch connectivity to the cloud, including Azure, as well as to your single and multiple data centers. In particular, Citrix SD-WAN as the on-ramp to Azurehelps enterprises simplify and automate large-scale branch-office network deployments. Through deep API integration with Microsoft Azure’s Virtual WAN service, Citrix SD-WAN enables fast on-boarding of enterprise apps and workloads to Azure cloud.
Maximizing the use of available bandwidth with sophisticated link bonding and network-path conditioning helps mitigate loss, and avoid the jitter and latency issues, while providing efficient and reliable throughput for business-critical applications.
Citrix SD-WAN is a fully integrated WAN edge platform which helps customers consolidate networking infrastructure together with security specifically, the enterprise grade router and firewall functionality at the branch or off-site work locations such as, clinics and supply depots or retail outlets among others. This saves much more on the otherwise unavoidable high bandwidth costs while IT simplifies application and data access from branches with the required set of security policies.
Citrix SD-WAN is recommended for banking, insurance, healthcare, retail and manufacturing enterprises who have global footprints.
Citrix SD-WAN is a smart choice for large and medium-sized organizations looking for an established WAN Edge partner. The choice and breadth of customer premises equipment (CPE) offers scalability for all enterprise site requirements from the micro and small branch up to single or multiple larger data centers. Citrix SD-WAN runs 100s of networks with 200+ sites up to networks with 1,000+ sites, and today, Citrix technology is capable of networks of 2,500 or more sites.
If an enterprise has made investments in third-party security solutions for their branch and off-site workplace locations, Citrix is sensitive to the level of effort that our customers have already made in those solutions. To support that, Citrix SD-WAN integrates seamlessly out of the box with commonly used security services including Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler. These ecosystem partnerships offer enterprises the choice of using a cloud-based secure web gateway for centralizing the policy management for users connecting from branches and any workplace in the world.
Citrix’s maturity across its entire portfolio of products and services, helps deliver technical support to Citrix SD-WAN customers throughout the sales and deployment cycles followed by day to day operations. In particular, Citrix global technical support provides 24×7 around-the-sun deep support and engagement.
There is much more to share on how Citrix SD-WAN excels in delivering experience, security and choice to enterprises as they expand to include more branches or off-site workplaces. Next in this series, I will post a couple more blog articles covering new and interesting capabilities followed by the Top 10 benefits of adopting Citrix SD-WAN that will get you (the IT professional) closer to your customer’s “day in the life of” experience.
If you have not tried Citrix SD-WAN yet, click here and try it free for 90 days!
