Citrix
The Future of App Delivery and Security for Remote Work

Over the past few years, organizations have been migrating their applications from on-premises data centers to the cloud to increase efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the pace of this migration, bringing on a new work from home norm. Now, organizations have to reassess their enterprise network architecture as users rely on home broadband to access business applications leaving IT without visibility. Also, IT has to re-examine security as it is no longer under their control inside a security perimeter. Businesses require a higher-level of performance and uptime from the network in addition to extra layers of security.

IT staff skills are often the key roadblock to a successful ‘journey to cloud.’ As an expert in network services, Citrix provides the much-required transition planning information and proven guidance via professional services to enable the shift to cloud. The company enables clients to apply proven methods to plan for a successful cloud migration and deployment, reducing strain on IT teams. Citrix seamlessly combines the power of intelligence, virtualization, app delivery, secure application access and a zero-trust security approach resulting in empowered organizations that deliver an enhanced employee experience.

Pankaj Gupta, Senior Director, Marketing, App Delivery and Security, Citrix, elaborates on the evolving security model following the shift to the cloud. Known as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), this new model is the convergence of WAN, network security services, and Zero Trust into a single cloud-delivered service model. Today, there are three approaches to how security is delivered in the market. Citrix supports these approaches with maximum flexibility and choice. The first is by adding a security stack to the data center which is inefficient because all the traffic goes to the data center, and you are limited by bandwidth and the appliances for security. The second, is adding security functions including firewall, secure web gateway, and more at the network edge. But the emerging trend for many of customers to deploy security stack as service in the cloud. The last approach is deploying centralized security and SD-WAN together as a cloud-delivered and cloud-managed service.

Citrixis introducing a new solution to bring together all the security functions alongside its SD-WAN capabilities as a cloud-delivered option. In addition to its SD-WAN solution, the newly introduced Citrix Secure Internet Access (SIA) solution, is a comprehensive global security cloud service that addresses all the modern enterprise security requirements. SIA includes a secure web gateway, next-generation firewall, data loss prevention, cloud access security broker, and AI-driven forensics with real-time threat intelligence from over ten engines.SIA ensures that the user is protected from visiting malicious websites that can affect their devices and network.

With a goal to empower organizations to deliver enhanced employee experience, Citrix combines the power of application intelligence, virtualization, app delivery, secure application access, and a zero-trust security approach in a seamless way

It can protect organization’s data from users by giving them access only to what they need to perform their jobs.

What is more, Citrix secures the underlying network without requiring manual configurations from IT professionals that may lead to mistakes or gaps. As an example, Citrix holds a strong relationship with Microsoft and offers optimization for its Office 365 applications. Their underlying network first recognizes each application’s usage, including SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, and optimizes and steers the traffic to the nearest Office 365 cloud entry point resulting in lower latency and an improved experience.

Further elaborating on its solutions, Pankaj points that with remote work culture is becoming the norm, with employees requiring uninterrupted home internet access for carrying smooth and flawless activities like a voice or video calls. Here, Citrix helps combine the client’s existing home broadband with cellular mobile connectivity to create a higher level of availability and bandwidth of the network. Similarly, for employees using home Wi-Fi connections, which are usually shared between several devices, the company can use two modes for their Wi-Fi for corporate vs. home giving employees a higher level of performance while using one Wi-Fi connection. What’s more, Citrix’s zero-touch approach enables users to simply power up the device while ensuring security as it’s automatically brought into the network within a matter of minutes.

In keeping with its goal of providing intelligent networking and security solutions, Citrix is working to provide built-in intelligence powered by AI to help IT teams easily spot performance issues over the cloud or on SaaS applications, which is otherwise a daunting task. With Citrix’s solutions, the IT teams can identify problems and can achieve remediation faster. “Our focus for the future goes beyond performance and security into the intelligence for networks,” says Gupta.