A quality work experience doesn’t just depend on the apps you deliver. It’s built on a foundation of high-performance networks. These networks composed of WANs and LANs bring your workforce to life. But the technologies IT has considered essential are changing.

Workers work where they choose, almost everywhere except the office nowadays! And applications are on the move, too — to the cloud. These shifts bring with them a new set of technology requirements to help maximize worker productivity and keep your business competitive and innovative. But, when these apps don’t perform well, work gets disrupted and productivity suffers. IT has to respond faster to keep workers up and running.

Without adequate visibility into performance issues, pinpointing the root cause takes longer and consumes valuable IT resources. For example, if a user complains of poor Teams audio quality, how do you know if the problem is with Teams itself, the VPN or the home network?

According to a survey by NetMotions, the No. 1 challenge for remote workers (and which caused an issue for 45.6 percent of those surveyed( was ensuring reliable network performance. What’s worse is that workers are losing confidence that IT can solve their problems and might not even bother opening trouble tickets.

As workers become more distributed and there are more points of failure between the user and the applications they are consuming, how can IT ensure a quality application experience for every worker?

Look to the Home Network

According to a recent IDC survey of enterprises, providing employees with WLAN (Wi-Fi) Access Points, WAN link bonding across technologies, and extending the WAN to home endpoints rank among the Top 5 ways to improve the quality of employee work-from-home connectivity.

IDC, Future of Enterprise Networking: Emergence of the New Normal, Doc # WC20210202, February 2021

The Foundation for Remote Work Is Built on Citrix SD-WAN 110

Citrix SD-WAN 110 is power-packed with a full feature set that gives your workers the highest network resiliency with sub-second failover, along with a best-in-class application experience for virtual, SaaS, and cloud applications, as well as comprehensive security.

From heavy-data users to power users, call center agents, IT support staff, execs and customer service reps, the Citrix SD-WAN 110 is how remote work gets done.

How Reliable Is It?

Integrated LTE with dual sim slots (active-passive) provides cellular connectivity in addition to broadband. Go to your favorite carriers and test which provider has the best performance.

The external USB-based dongle provides LTE support from an optional additional provider provides active-active connections.

By creating a virtual path from multiple underlying links (broadband, LTE) Citrix SD-WAN aggregates all available bandwidth and provides dual-ended QoS, and ultra-fast failover in case of congestion or outages.

How Secure Is it?

Having Citrix SD-WAN as an 802.1x WiFi secure access point at workers’ homes boosts bandwidth and ensures resiliency by leveraging broadband and combining it with LTE.

Secure with SASE

Strong encryption, a built-in firewall, and centralized policy management bring native security. Adding Citrix Secure Internet Access service provides a full cloud-delivered security stack with global reach for an unbeatable SASE architecture. It includes secure web gateway, firewall-as-a-service, and cloud access security brokers, data loss prevention, and sandboxing functionality. Protect all applications with unified, cloud-delivered security for a complete secure access service edge (SASE) solution.

How Easy Is It to Deploy and Manage?

  • Ideal for lean IT — A cloud-managed branch-in-a-box solution that consolidates multiple networking capabilities like firewall, LTE, and Wi-Fi into a sleek desktop appliance, all managed through a single pane of glass. Gone is the complexity associated with managing multiple networks and multiple locations. If you’re dealing with a large number of branch offices, Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator makes provisioning network changes a snap.
  • Just plug and play — With self-configuring, zero-touch deployment capability, Citrix SD-WAN 110 can be configured within minutes. No networking know-how is required.
  • All for about the cost of a cell phone bill  Your business no longer needs to pay for private and MPLS connections at every site, even the offices themselves in some cases. Citrix SD-WAN 110 can leverage lower-cost broadband links and dual 4G/LTE connects (internal – dual sim and external USB dongle) to support business critical applications. And, simple subscription-based pricing eliminates upfront CAPEX costs. Learn how you can get simple, reliable connectivity for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Standard with Citrix SD-WAN 110.
  • A holistic network view for the remote workforce — Knowing what’s wrong in real time means that you can start to fix it faster. From the link quality, to the users, to the apps, Citrix allows you to remotely monitor the entire network globally. With Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator cloud-hosted management service, you can monitor LTE and WiFi signal strength remotely. IT admins can see the signaling RSSI values to help with the best placement of the LTE antennas. (Click images below to view larger.)

Get power-packed performance — With support for up to 200 Mbps bandwidth, Citrix SD-WAN 110 helps build a scalable, secure, uninterrupted network infrastructure to support your requirements.

To learn more about Citrix SD-WAN 110 specifications, check out these additional resources: