KKH is one of the largest health insurance funds in Germany and has been around for more than 125 years, advising and assisting their policy holders in all areas of health. Almost 1.7 million people place their trust in the insurance protection and excellent service and healthcare provided by KKH, which has about 3,800 employees in 100 locations. These locations include large call centers and insurance centers that handle insurance administration and scheduling.

Implementing a New eLearning Platform

KKH implemented a new eLearning platform and rolled it out to all their sites. Because they also rely heavily on Cisco Jabber multimedia applications and Microsoft Office 365 for day-to-day productivity, it was quickly evident that the current network needed an upgrade.

With only a single MPLS link connecting each site to the data centers, outages, link flapping, and insufficient bandwidth plagued the video quality, causing it to lag terribly. Further, connections with bandwidth of 2 Mbps to 6 Mbps meant that only 10 percent of users could watch eLearning over YouTube in 720p SD resolution. More bandwidth was needed to deliver learning videos in HD quality.

KKH Teams with AppSphere

KKH IT architect Sascha Nagel went looking for a consulting company that could help them find the right IT infrastructure. With AppSphere AG, a consulting firm in southern Germany and a longtime Citrix partner, they found a company with comprehensive knowhow in this area.

KKH discussed their requirements with the AppSphere consultants. They considered expanding the MPLS or buying DSL lines. However, MPLS is costly and would take a significant amount of time to deploy across KKH’s network (even just an upgrade). And, DSL could not match the stronger reliability that MPLS offered. KKH also wanted to be able to consume more cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

The Solution: Citrix SD-WAN

With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Windows Server freshly upgraded and new NVIDIA GRID™ graphics cards installed, KKH was nearly ready to deliver the new workspace. First, they started searching for a WAN optimization solution to reduce the amount of bandwidth the apps used.

AppSphere consultants instead presented the benefits of a full SD-WAN solution, which would also allow KKH to reduce its dependency on MPLS, add reliability with multiple links, and provide quality of service for prioritizing the video and VoIP traffic.

“We could have just looked at expanding our MPLS bandwidth or purchase DSL lines, but with SD-WAN, we realized we could have a combination of MPLS, DSL and LTE all together, and the business case made a lot of sense to us,” Nagel says.

AppSphere prepared a PoC for KKH with two or three boxes to simulate branch connectivity to the headquarters. Every packet was routed properly. Next, they did a pilot with five branches to test DSL and MPLS together using Citrix SD-WAN.

Before Citrix SD-WAN, users weren’t able to work on Microsoft Office applications and other core apps if other users were watching eLearning videos. There wasn’t enough bandwidth capacity.

“Now, Citrix SD-WAN’s fair bandwidth sharing allows users to still work even while others are watching videos because it ensures there’s plenty of bandwidth for each user,” Nagel says.

With Citrix Virtual Desktops, KKH can enable GPU acceleration even on the older thin clients, which cannot do traffic acceleration. In the future, KKH will take advantage of Citrix’s Browser Content Redirection to the clients and then perform direct and local breakout from their sites to cloud services. With SD-WAN to route and optimize that traffic efficiently, they can deliver a high-quality user experience.

SD-WAN for HDX Visibility

In addition, because KKH uses the HDX technology in Citrix Virtual Desktops, SD-WAN can provide deep visibility into the quality of experience with dashboards that show how the virtual apps are performing for users and can quickly resolve any issues, such as excessive latency, that may come up.

SD-WAN for VoIP Quality

By sending VoIP traffic over both MPLS and DSL links simultaneously, SD-WAN helps ensure VoIP quality and prevents calls from dropping. This means the quality of video has also improved, making lagging video a problem of the past. In the future, they’ll be able to locally breakout video to SaaS services like YouTube using SD-WAN to optimize that traffic and route it directly.

“Citrix SD-WAN has given our branches a clear bandwidth advantage,” Nagel says. “Both the individual users as well as the entire company benefit from this new technology. Because the easy and robust transmission, delivery of multimedia content is now much higher quality while bandwidth costs were reduced. As a result, user satisfaction has evidently increased.”

Learn more about how KKH is using Citrix SD-WAN and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to deliver online training and get a demo of Citrix SD-WAN.