For decades, business-critical applications have resided in data centers and for good reason: IT had operational control for management, scale, and security. With the proliferation of cloud services as a viable alternative to on-premises computing, the location of applications has taken a dramatic shift. 451 Research cites that 70% of enterprises are utilizing SaaS applications and that more than 32% are using a form of private cloud, IaaS, or PaaS.

As organizations migrate their application workloads to the cloud, the network needs to undergo a shift to align with this new paradigm. This means extending into public cloud environments, which could be any combination of IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. Further, organizations are leveraging the best of both worlds: data center connectivity combined with cloud connectivity in the form of hybrid cloud.

This guide explores four cloud migration stages designed to match an organization’s network and application requirements. It also looks at the benefits provided by Citrix SD-WAN in terms of application experience, security, and cloud on-ramp automation.