Citrix Unveils Innovations at Citrix Synergy to Power the Future of Work

SINGAPORE – May 31, 2017 – Organizations that harness the full potential of their people will drive business success that will power the future of work. According to a recent Oxford Economic Research study, executives who supported virtual work and mobile business strategies outperformed their peers across a wide range of business metrics, including higher revenue growth and profits, reduced expenses, increased employee retention and better customer satisfaction.[1]

To help businesses drive transformational performance and greater employee engagement, Citrix announced new secure digital workspace offerings at Citrix Synergy that will power the future of work, enabling customers to reimagine where and how work happens – and what connected ‘things’ are involved.

New Citrix innovations include enhanced user experience capabilities in a unified, secure digital workspace; new mobile, software-defined networking and analytics services in the Citrix Cloud and advanced document workflows. In addition, Citrix is introducing a new intelligent security framework geared to secure and simplify access and control of the apps and data people need to work.

“The industry continues its rapid shift toward cloud and mobile-first strategies to boost workforce productivity and drive end user satisfaction. In fact, recent IDC research shows that in 2019, enterprises will spend $2.1 trillion on technology and services to implement and manage digital transformation initiatives,” said Robert Young, research director, IT Service Management and Client Virtualization Software, IDC. “To help drive customer success in the future of work, Citrix has an opportunity to create exceptional end user experiences while providing IT with empowering tools to drive change, processes, and policies.”

Simplifying the User Experience to Fuel Productivity

Gartner says organizations currently using cloud services indicate they are allocating 40 percent of their IT budget to cloud-related spending (including cloud-related services). Seventy-eight percent of these organizations plan to increase their spending on cloud through 2017.[2] This proliferation of cloud technologies is frustrating end users who must navigate multiple cloud services, apps, and data sources as well as disparate access methods and credentials. Meanwhile, shadow IT increases these challenges by adding even more unsanctioned apps and tools. This, in turn, increases service complexity and the risk of security breaches as users circumvent IT standards.

To fuel productivity, Citrix is introducing an enhanced secure digital workspace user experience, which unifies access and management of mobile, SaaS, web and Windows apps and documents, and consolidates access, control and workflows in one, easy-to-use solution. With a single sign-on using any federated identity, employees gain simple, secure access to a seamless, consistent experience on any device. Unlike other solutions, the Citrix secure digital workspace is designed to be contextual, ensuring employees have the optimal balance of security, productivity and performance based on location, device, identity and other analytics. 

The new workspace experience is also the only solution to include advanced content collaboration, information rights management and business workflow capabilities. From directly within the secure digital workspace, users can create, edit and collaborate on Office 365 online documents. They can then initiate a custom workflow and approval process with colleagues – all without leaving the workspace, and without having to re-authenticate as they switch between SaaS applications.

Providing Enhanced Security and Analytics

As organizations plan for their future, security continues to be a top priority. A recent global survey focused on security and IT professionals found that 73 percent say data management, 76 percent say configuration management and 72 percent say app management are the keys to reducing the security risk over the next two years in building a new IT infrastructure.[3]

The expanding and changing enterprise security perimeter – with new endpoints, locations, data sources, networks and clouds – is creating the need for more intelligence in orchestrating security policies across this new security perimeter. In addition, IT organizations need the ability to enforce those policies. Citrix addresses these evolving security needs with a new and unique approach that’s built around the reality of how people work. This approach provides expanded controls to form the basis for a new software-defined perimeter of the digital workspace, and complements other layers of defense in a multi-layer approach to security. In addition, to provide security-focused offerings to help Citrix customers better protect their Citrix environments, Citrix Consulting Services is formalizing a Security Practice.

Today, Citrix is unveiling Citrix Analytics, a new, holistic security and behavior analytics offering that extends the capabilities of the proven Citrix NetScaler Management and Analytics System (MAS) with new behavior detection, insights, and proactive risk resolution capabilities. This new offering leverages machine learning. The new security solution analyzes data sets across the Citrix product portfolio – XenApp/XenDesktop, XenMobile, ShareFile, NetScaler and leverages machine learning algorithms and application behavior anomaly detection technology to enable IT organizations to find and quickly troubleshoot application infrastructure performance issues.

Meeting Customers Wherever They Are on Their Cloud Adoption Journey

Citrix Cloud continues to provide the cloud-based management plane across all Citrix technologies, integrating them with a simple, consistent administrative experience. This empowers customers to easily combine the applications, data and tools needed to work from the cloud and deliver them to people anywhere in secure, personalized and contextually relevant ways. Because Citrix Cloud is designed to manage multi-cloud environments, customers who use it for virtual apps, desktops and data can place their workloads on any public or hybrid cloud, or on any on-premises virtualized environment.

Citrix has accelerated innovation in the cloud, with the introduction of new services, features and capabilities to build out this powerful workspace delivery model. These services include XenApp Essentials and XenDesktop Essentials that are native to Microsoft Azure, but managed from Citrix Cloud. Additional Citrix Cloud services include XenMobile device management and app management and NetScaler Gateway Service, allowing customers to create a gateway-in-the-cloud, speeding and simplifying implementation. In addition, Citrix Cloud offers integration with Azure Active Directory for administrators, internet of things (IoT) capabilities, and other new services in our labs area.

Customers, like ÅF, are creating secure digital workspaces through Citrix Cloud. ÅF was founded in 1895 as The Southern Swedish Steam Generator Association and has been at the forefront of engineering, energy, and industrial design ever since. The firm has recently revealed how it uses gaming engine and virtual reality software to create 3-D, walk-through visualizations for clients on building and infrastructure projects.

“By adopting a Citrix Cloud solution running workloads on Microsoft Azure, we have created a new way of working at ÅF. This solution gives us the agility we need to respond to business needs, whether giving our engineers remote access to using resource-intensive applications like CAD, or integrating the acquisition of a specialist consulting firm. With Citrix Cloud, we have created the collaborative workplace that enables our employees to work freely from anywhere on any device.”

“To be efficient and successful, organizations need to provide their people with a simple, unified and consistent user experience on any device with intelligent security that’s designed to deliver the workspace of the future,” said PJ Hough, senior vice president, product, Citrix. “To protect and sustain business operations, enterprises need powerful new security analytics that predict potential risks and enable managers to proactively address them. Today, we are introducing new products and services that our customers can use to embrace the future of work, increase productivity and tap into the latent potential of their workforces.”