Citrix Ushers in New Era of Employee Engagement and Productivity

Citrix Systems, Inc. announced it is making work smarter through next-generation intelligence capabilities that allow companies to deliver a unified and contextual experience across any device or network that engages employees and enables them to perform at their best. The enhancements were unveiled at Citrix Synergy, the premier digital work conference taking place in Atlanta this week.

“There’s a lot of noise in the workplace today that keeps us from doing what we want and are paid to do,” said PJ Hough, Chief Product Officer, Citrix. “At Citrix, our solutions are designed with one thing in mind: eliminate distractions so that people can focus on work that matters and do what they do best.”

Complexity Tamed
To do any job and do it well, you need the right tools. The problem is, most of us have too many available to us and they’re too hard to find and use.

“Employees today deal with as many as 11 different apps a day to get their work done. And most of their functionality goes unused or makes tasks more difficult as employees spend too much time – almost 10 hours a week – searching for the information they need,” said Hough. “The overload and complexity hinder employee experience and lead to low levels of employee engagement. That must change.”

Through Citrix® Workspace™, companies can provide single sign on access to all the apps and content employees prefer to use in one, unified experience, including out-of-the-box integrations with more than 150 enterprise applications such as Salesforce, Workday, SAP Ariba and SAP Concur, ServiceNow, Microsoft Outlook and G Suite.

Planned integrations with the most widely used identity and access management providers, including Okta, Ping, Radius, and GoogleID, combined with Citrix Workspace security controls will enable them to deliver these apps more securely than operating them natively.

A Smarter Approach
According to Forrester Research, Inc., “…Improving human performance at work is the most important objective for workforce technology strategy and employee motivation, customer experience and financial performance depend on it.” (Transform The Employee Experience To Drive Business Performance, Executive Overview: The Employee Experience Playbook, February 12, 2018)

With the infusion of machine learning and simplified workflows in Citrix Workspace, companies can transform the employee experience by not only organizing work, but guiding and making it smarter.

Leveraging over 100 microapps pre-built for popular software services, Citrix Workspace can automatically surface prioritized and relevant tasks that allow employees to complete their work in fewer steps and with greater efficiency.

Rather than sifting through their inbox, searching calendars or going six clicks deep into an enterprise application to get things done, employees can have prioritized actions and relevant insights automatically delivered to their phone, tablet or PC so they can execute work quickly and move on.

Work without Constraints

Most of us work from an average of four locations a day. With Citrix Workspace, companies can provide a superior experience that enables employees to work seamlessly across the channels and devices they prefer. Through new integrations with some of the most commonly used collaboration tools, including Microsoft Teams and Slack, content can be delivered to employees in one constant stream, eliminating the need for them to switch context.

Through a virtual instance of the Citrix SD-WAN appliance soon to be available in the Google Cloud Marketplace and increased integration of Citrix ADC with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, service mesh with Istio architectures and open source CNCF tools, they can deliver a consistent and reliable application experience to users regardless of where they are located.

“We’re bringing the simplicity and utility we enjoy in our personal lives to the workplace and shifting the focus of work from applications that aggravate to actions that matter to engage the entire organization and improve the employee experience,” said Hough.

Managed Desktops as a Service
Through a planned Desktop as a Service offering, Citrix, together with its robust ecosystem of partners, will make it easier than ever for IT to provide a unified, secure work environment in the cloud from which employees can access their individual desktops and all the SaaS applications, cloud services, fileshares, cloud-based office applications and corporate resources they need to get work done anywhere, anytime using any device. The company will initially enable the delivery of desktops managed on Microsoft Azure.

Expanded Workspace Security
With the deep understanding of user device and access behavior and intelligent capabilities underlying Citrix Analytics, companies can balance demands for flexibility and choice with the need to maintain a secure environment and dynamically apply security policies without getting in the way of the user experience. The solution also provides full logging of security threats and automated resolutions that can be monitored by security experts and exported to other analytics platforms through planned integration with Splunk.

“At Saab, we believe that true collaboration leads to better solutions. But we work every day with classified information. So while we need to be open in one end, we need to be very closed in another to ensure data integrity for those we serve,” said Mats Hultin, Group CIO, Saab. “With Citrix, we can balance these needs and provide a secure and reliable way for our teams to connect and work together to meet the needs of our customers and give us a competitive edge.”

Malware Beware
As the list of SaaS, web and mobile apps running within the average organization and devices used to access them continues to grow, companies are increasingly vulnerable to system attacks and data theft. To help defend against them, Citrix has enabled new capabilities that protect apps and content delivered within its digital workspace solutions against a host of malware threats, including:

• Keylogging
• Screen capture/session videoing

The new capabilities provide endpoint and browser security for all connections to Citrix® Virtual Apps and Desktops™ from both personal and managed devices and protect all work completed in Citrix Workspace™.

“As the network perimeter fragments and the internet is darkened by encryption, the endpoint becomes the penultimate control point for the implementation of device, application, and data security. However, endpoints, by their very nature, create a special challenge as decentralization is not the friend of security. Specialized and sophisticated tools thus become mainstream; vendors with innovative offerings and segment-appropriate channel strategies are capitalizing,” explains Frank Dickson, research vice president, IDC Security Products and Identity and Access Management research practices.

A Superior Experience

More than half of all Web traffic is driven by BOTs that can negatively impact user experience and slow business transactions. Through new behavior-based BOT detection capabilities to be delivered within Citrix ADC, including advanced device finger printing and signatures, companies will be able to:

• Mitigate attacks like password spraying, credential stuffing and content scrapping
• Reduce revenue and data loss

And with planned enhancements to the Citrix Analytics Machine Learning (ML) engine, companies will be able to uncover performance issues by monitoring network latency, easily identify groups of users experiencing poor performance and take action to improve their experience.

A Unified View

Citrix has integrated risk indicators and user and entity inventory from Microsoft’s Graph Security API into Citrix Analytics. With the integration, security administrators now have a unified threat intelligence view across their Citrix and Microsoft solutions that will allow them to improve the breadth and accuracy of signals and take actions to mitigate them across both portfolios.

A Better Way to Work

“Technology is an engine of innovation. But in many ways, it has stalled and become a barrier to productivity and progress,” Hough said. “At Citrix, our mission is to deliver the experience, security and choice our customers need to spend less time managing technology and more time harnessing it to deliver a compelling employee experience that transforms business results.”