New Mobile Enterprise Solutions Help Customers Embrace Consumerisation without Compromising Security and Control
BARCELONA, Spain: This week at Citrix Synergy™, the conference where mobile workstyles and cloud services meet, Citrix unveiled the next phase of its strategy to enable the mobile enterprise. With the advent of consumerisation, mobility and the cloud, an increasingly mobile workforce is looking for easier ways to work the way they want – with anyone, from any location, on any device. With this week’s announcements, Citrix gives customers of all sizes the Power to Say Yes to consumer-inspired mobile workstyles with an expanding portfolio of solutions that give employees the freedom and flexibility they want, combined with the security and control businesses need. This week’s announcements make it easier for companies of all sizes to go mobile – empowering employees to interact securely with any combination of data, apps and devices – then bringing it all together in a seamless, integrated experience for end users.
Saying Yes to More than Three Billion Devices
The starting point of the Citrix enterprise mobility strategy is Citrix Receiver™, the company’s universal software client. Available for free on consumer app stores, Citrix Receiver gives employees secure, self-service access to all the apps and data they need to work from any device – all with a beautifully designed user experience tailored to the device they are using. Citrix Receiver now supports more than three billion devices, including all major tablet, smartphone, laptop, Mac and PC platforms – and will add support for new Windows 8 tablets and laptops as they come on the market.
To further extend its support of new consumer-style devices, Citrix also announced a new version of Citrix XenClient™ that provides virtual desktops to go for the millions of new lightweight Ultrabooks™ transforming the laptop market. XenClient for Ultrabooks uses a client-side hypervisor that runs directly on the laptop, but is connected to the corporate datacenter for centralised synchronisation and management. For end users, this means they get all the power of a local Windows experience on laptops and Ultrabooks, even when disconnected from the network. As soon as they connect again, any changes are automatically synchronised with a central image in the datacenter. This innovative approach extends all the benefits of VDI to mobile workers with no compromise in performance or security. The combination of Citrix Receiver and XenClient offer a perfect starting point for companies looking to roll out Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programmes to employees in a way that’s secure, easy and proven.
Solving the Cloud Data Problem
As consumer devices enter the workforce in record numbers, one of the first challenges for most businesses is how to handle the resulting data problem. End users increasingly want to use personal mobile devices to access their work documents from a diverse range of consumer laptops, mobile tablets and smart phones. In the absence of an easy-to-use solution from IT, employees increasingly rely on consumer cloud services that do not rely on corporate security, like Dropbox, to access documents on the go from any of their own devices, and share them with other colleagues via the cloud. While solutions like this offer great productivity for end users, they create a security nightmare for businesses, placing mission critical intellectual property at risk, and making it nearly impossible to comply with security and privacy regulations.
The best way to address this problem is for businesses to offer a secure data sharing service to employees that gives them all the ease-of-use and mobile device support of their favourite consumer cloud services – combined with all the security and control required by the business. To address this problem, Citrix this week announced the immediate availability of Citrix ShareFile™ with StorageZones. This innovative new solution gives employees all the ease and flexibility they want, while providing IT with the ability to choose where corporate data is stored, including on-premise within their own secure datacenters. Because ShareFile supports enterprise client-side security, corporate data accessed on personal devices is encrypted, and can be remotely wiped by the business at any time if the employee leaves the company, or the device is lost or stolen.
This best-of-both-worlds approach gives users true “follow-me data” services across all their corporate and personal devices, while allowing the business to meet strict security, data sovereignty, and compliance requirements. The new ShareFile StorageZones capability is available now as a software download, and will soon be available as a StorageZones MPX™ appliance powered by Citrix NetScaler® that transparently integrates all the networking and security functionality needed to deploy on-premise StorageZones into a single, all-in-one solution.
To further extend the value of this solution, Citrix announced new StorageZone Connectors for ShareFile that allow customers to securely connect a ShareFile StorageZone instance to data in existing network storage systems. This innovative capability makes it easy for users to securely access their work documents from anywhere on any device through a common ShareFile app, regardless of where the data is actually stored behind the scenes. Citrix also announced plans to deliver ShareFile StorageZones for Microsoft Windows Azure in 2013. This integration will allow ShareFile customers to leverage all the power of the Azure cloud as a secure, seamless extension of their enterprise data sharing strategy.
A Single Control Point for Mobile Apps and Data
The final piece of a comprehensive mobile enterprise strategy for IT is an integrated solution that brings together the management of mobile apps, data and devices into a single, unified control point. That’s where Citrix CloudGateway™ comes in. This week at Synergy, Citrix conducted a live public demonstration of CloudGateway with its groundbreaking MDX “mobile device experience” technology. The addition of new MDX features gives CloudGateway a set of mobile app management technologies that enable full security and control over native iOS, Android and HTML 5 apps.