The Citrix and Microsoft Partnership provides customers with new and outstanding capabilities on a regular basis, the latest of these being Citrix SD-WAN as a launch partner for the Azure Virtual WAN service.
The joint solution helps to enhance user experience, deliver consistent productivity and automate branch network deployments.
You might not think of Microsoft as a networking company, but as the second largest public cloud, with a global footprint, they actually own and operate one of the world’s largest WANs. Microsoft owns and operates a global fibre optic network providing capacity for their services such as Azure and Office 365.
Image Source: Microsoft
Azure Virtual WAN allows branches to connect to a local Azure Hub and utilise the Azure Network as the transit network for connectivity to Azure services, Cloud services, Office 365 or even your own data centre.
Image Source: Microsoft
As a launch partner for Azure Virtual WAN, Citrix SD-WAN provides the “last-mile” solution. Branches connect into a local Azure Hub via one of the 130 available edge sites, transit the Azure WAN to an Azure Hub near the destination, ensuring that the majority of the connection occurs over the ultra-fast low latency fibre optic network. Once customer traffic is in the Microsoft global network, it terminates in a virtual hub. An Azure Virtual WAN is composed of multiple virtual hubs. Customers can create their own hubs in different Azure regions based on their operational locations.
Citrix SD-WAN adds value to the Azure Virtual WAN solution in the last mile, providing central orchestration of the network connectivity and assignment of branches to the nearest Azure Hub, as well as providing the same multi-path intelligent traffic management that we expect from an SD-WAN solution.
To connect to Azure Virtual WAN, customers have the option of either using IPSEC (Internet Protocol Security) connections from their SD-WAN appliances, or alternatively by deploying Azure hosted Citrix SD-WAN appliances in your Azure regions of choice, enabling full end-to-end traffic management and visibility.
Leveraging the Azure Virtual WAN and Citrix SD-WAN together can provide an exciting new opportunity to move away from costly MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) connections whilst enhancing user experience, availability and turbo-charging your access to Azure and Office 365 Services.
To find out more about the Citrix SD-WAN and Azure Virtual WAN capabilities, please contact your account manager.
- By Andrew McCullough (Solutions Architect)
