How often do you open a website and it takes forever to load the pages? Working with slow apps like this can cause frustration and a poor user experience.

That delay is due to network latency or, in other words, the time it takes for data to go from point A to point B. In the simple case of a slow website, it’s the time it takes for data to travel through the network between the web server and the user’s web browser. The longer the distance between the user and the host server, the longer the delay, leading to a poor user experience. But in today’s computing world, high latency isn’t an option. In fact, most enterprises that rely on a public cloud infrastructure require performance similar to that of their on-premises infrastructure.

We’re excited to announce the addition of new Citrix Gateway points of presence (PoPs) in the Chennai, India, and Johannesburg, South Africa, regions that will help to improve the user experience and enable high availability of our products to customers there.

With the addition of these two PoPs, Citrix Gateway now has 14 PoPs around the world, strengthening our overall global presence. This helps enterprises to deliver high-performing applications and minimize the effects of network outages.

Microsoft Azure was the first to announce its availability in Africa region, and we wanted our customers in that region to benefit. Most Citrix customers in India have their virtual desktop infrastructure in Azure, so having a Citrix Gateway India PoP in Azure would benefit from Azure’s networking backbone infrastructure to deliver fast and scalable performance.

Internally, Citrix Gateway uses Citrix Intelligent Traffic Management (ITM), which offers GSLB as a service and provides granular, real-time visibility of the internet from the users’ perspective. Citrix ITM is always up to date with real-time information about data center health and internet conditions for each user and can resolve a site much more quickly. Bringing the decision closer to the user means faster traffic steering and can dramatically reduce the time to first byte and keep users engaged.

PoP in Chennai, India

Previously, users from this region were connecting to our Singapore PoP to access their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops infrastructure and experienced latencies of 80-100 milliseconds. Though these latencies fall under the acceptable range, they might spike up if we were facing network outage in that region, leading to poor experience. With the addition of the Chennai PoP, users are seeing latencies as low as 6 milliseconds (reduced latency by 15x), boosting their efficiency and productivity.

Source: Citrix Intelligent Traffic Management

PoP in Johannesburg, South Africa

In the past, users in Africa were connecting to PoPs in Europe, experiencing latencies as high as 500 milliseconds while accessing their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops infrastructure. With the addition of the Johannesburg PoP, users are now experiencing a huge improvement in performance and low latencies of 5 milliseconds.

Source: Citrix Intelligent Traffic Management

Both these PoPs are available today and are serving live user traffic. No action is needed from our customers to benefit from this global presence expansion. For more information on our Citrix Gateway PoPs, please visit our resource map.