Citrix CloudBridge simplifies and accelerates application delivery from the cloud

Citrix has announced the expansion of its CloudBridge™ product to incorporate wide-area networking (WAN) optimisation capabilities from the industry-leading Citrix Branch Repeater® product. This new product line will address the transforming needs of enterprises as they evolve their applications from small datacenters to global locations and the cloud, while delivering the best user experience for virtualised desktops and mobile users. By merging Branch Repeater, which accelerates a wide array of PC applications today and delivers the highest performance for virtualised desktops, into its CloudBridge accelerated cloud connectivity solution, Citrix will enable enterprises to deliver applications from any cloud while allowing a smooth transition from legacy PC applications. The same solution also allows enterprise datacenters to establish secure and optimised bridges to public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft® Windows Azure™ as well as to their own datacenters and branches, broadening the choice of locations for application execution and delivery.

In the cloud era, businesses no longer want to house data at remote locations, instead opting to centralise files and applications in datacenters and the cloud. As a result, IT must transform from installed applications on PC’s, to cloud-based application services, enabling enterprises to take advantage of cloud computing while continuing to serve users with the latest business applications. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure fully removes the need to optimise legacy applications in branches while emphasising the importance of delivering a secure and outstanding experience for virtual desktop users. Securely connecting branches to cloud-based services while continuing to serve private WAN-connected applications delivered from the corporate datacenter provides the best user experience while maintaining security and reducing ongoing WAN costs.

Unlike complex and expensive competitive solutions that require IT to purchase multiple products from different vendors, the new CloudBridge is an extensible platform that will deliver IT twice the functionality yet require only half the amount of hardware, and all from the same vendor. When deployed in conjunction with the Citrix XenDesktop® product and Citrix XenApp® product, CloudBridge reduces bandwidth-per-desktop by more than 50 percent, significantly decreases high-definition video bandwidth consumption, all while continuing to provide substantial performance improvements for traditional enterprise applications such as email, file sharing, and database transactions. The new CloudBridge provides a solution to optimise legacy PC applications while enabling enterprises to immediately leverage cloud-based application delivery via virtualised, PC client and mobile applications.