11 May 2015

By using its virtual WAN, Citrix claims enterprises can easily pool active and backup link capacity.

Citrix reckons its new CloudBridge Virtual WAN solution reduces the cost of delivering applications, documents and IT services to branch offices by up to 80 per cent, while ensuring nearly 100 per cent application availability. 

According to the company, scaling WAN bandwidth is expensive for enterprises that have traditionally relied on costly MPLS services to avoid disruptions to their business and maintain the usability of mission-critical applications.

To address this, CloudBridge allows organisations to create a virtualised WAN by bonding together multiple network services, such as MPLS, broadband, mobile and satellite internet, to maximise network capacity and reliability. 

Citrix claims the software constantly assesses the performance of paths within the virtualised WAN to instantaneously and automatically adapt to changing network conditions. It says this ensures constant connectivity of mission-critical applications without human intervention or complex routing table reconfigurations. 

Other benefits include enabling enterprises to “easily and seamlessly” pool active and backup link capacity, therefore eliminating wasted bandwidth. Citrix says CloudBridge provides a failover system to ensure adequate bandwidth on the best-performing remaining paths is used to deliver business-critical applications.

It adds that advanced encryption allows the secure connection of branch offices to cloud services. Users can also easily monitor WAN performance via a simple management system that provides end-to-end network visibility.