The IT Nerd

By: Michael Murphy, VP and Country Manager, Citrix Canada

In recent months, we’ve seen an increase in the number of cyber security breaches across the world. From concerns over the DNC’s email leaks to Wannacry and the Petya virus the vulnerability of corporate data to external threats has been exposed on a global pedestal.

Modern cyberattacks are no longer limited to government or those at the highest levels within corporations. Anyone with internet access or a smart phone needs to consider how they will safeguard themselves from a potential hack. From a business perspective, companies need to approach security assuming a threat is imminent and acknowledge that it is a collective responsibility to take steps toward minimizing that threat – not just the responsibility of the IT department.

So, what are some best practice provisions that companies can employ to safeguard their data from a potential breach?

Educate and re-educate. Security cannot begin and end with the IT department. Every employee needs to be aware of and updated on company security policies and educated on what the proper tools and procedures are for accessing their apps and data remotely, regardless of the device. Appreciating and recognizing the threats and threat vectors that exist and are constantly evolving is equally important for employees to be knowledgeable about. Making everyone accountable will also help to demystify security as something owned by one department.

Identify risks in the system. Building a sound IT infrastructure means constantly assessing potential weak points. This requires a network infrastructure that allows a company to recognize where risks may be and identify methods for fixing those risks. IT must be made aware of any 3^rd party apps running on the network, any users who are accessing the system remotely, and help identify and direct any unusual traffic access the data center.

Virtualize your apps and data. Companies can prevent the loss of data by virtualizing applications and storing information on the cloud rather than the hardware itself. That way, if an employee’s computer is attacked, no company data can be found on it. Using centralized data centres mean IT can update computers with the necessary patches all at once, rather than relying on end-users to complete the updates.

Have a disaster recovery plan in place. In the event that a breach does occur it is imperative that companies have a thorough, company-wide disaster recovery plan. Each level of the organization should be aware of what steps must be taken to first stop a breach and then re-secure company systems.

Security is about matching wants with needs. Employees want ease of access, companies want productivity and both want the comfort of knowing their information and devices are secure.

Ideally, businesses are integrated, security is comprehensive, and digital workspaces unify and enrich the user experience. For this ideal to be realized all types of enterprises must consider every touchpoint within their organization. IT must manage increasingly complex, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and integrating smart IT practices when threats are known will help to protect in times of crisis and quickly restore systems that have been compromised.

This holistic security and analytics approach will help organizations to address the growing cybersecurity threats we all presently face, while preparing for the future unknown.

Citrix has announced it has been named as a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Mobility Management Software 2017 Vendor Assessment. The IDC MarketScape highlighted XenMobile integration capabilities along with strong remote access control, VPN and granular inspection and security of mobile traffic as key differentiators.

According to the report, “For all-in Citrix environments, XenMobile is the most logical choice of EMM platform to integrate with a larger Citrix Xen-based application and desktop delivery architecture. Even for customers not going all the way with Citrix Workspace concept, having these products together is an advantage from a cost and overall management perspective.”

This highlights the fact that Citrix is a leader in this space, and that they should be on the list for companies looking for enterprise mobility management functionality.

Source: Oxford Economics And Citrix

In today’s digital world, employees want flexibility to work outside the traditional constraints of the office. While more companies have begun accommodating remote workers, other companies have pulled back from allowing remote work. The best example of the latter being IBM who pulled the plug on remote work in May of this year which lead to many people leaving IBM. However on the other end of the spectrum, Automatic who owns WordPress closed some rather expensive real estate in San Fransisco because almost everyone worked remotely.

The fact is that remote work isn’t going away, a recent Oxford Economics study indicates that work now comes to you, and with you, wherever and whenever you decide. Mobile technology and new approaches to management are creating a new kind of digital workplace that can increase productivity, lower costs, and reduce stress. In other words, working remotely isn’t going away and companies need to embrace this trend. To better understand how companies can do just that, I had a conversation with Ching Mac of Citrix Canada to get his thoughts as this something that Citrix has been on the leading edge of for years.

According to Mr. Mac, what Citrix sees is that work is not about being in a 9 to 5 environment. It’s about getting stuff things done and that can between say 6 AM to Midnight wherever you happen to be with breaks in between to run an errand or something similar. He calls is work slicing which is an appropriate term from my perspective. It increases your productivity and people are a lot more happy.

For companies to successfully pull this off, they need a proper IT infrastructure to support that, along with a strong mobile work policy that is applied across the organization fairly. These are areas that Citrix can help an organization who wishes to roll out something like this as most of their workers are remote and they’ve been doing this for years successfully. I say that because they have proven solutions be it XenApp and XenDesktop or XenServer that can make this largely pain free for companies because it allows for a consistent user experience regardless of whether you use a iPad or a Windows 10 desktop while ensuring security for your organization. That’s important  because the security needs of one organization are often different from another organization.

Finally, employers will have to adapt to this new reality. Mr. Mac’s advice is that there’s no point in fighting it. People do want this sort of flexibility and the millennial generation especially expect it. So be open to employees using the device of their choice from wherever they want to use it from. Just have the infrastructure and policies in place. At the end, it’s only going to help that employer get higher employee satisfaction and productivity from their workforce. Both of those are things that any company should want at the end of the day.

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.

To help businesses drive transformational performance and greater employee engagement, Citrix is announcing 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.

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. This proliferation of cloud technologies is frustrating end users that 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 professional 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.

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.

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.

Related links

• Synergy 2017 Newsroom
• Blog: Increase your Security Efficacy with NetScaler 12.0
• Blog: Helping Customers Transition to the Cloud with SD-WAN
• Blog: Citrix and Microsoft: A Year of Achievement … And We’re Just Getting Started

There is no one-size-fits-all security solution to address the threat landscape today’s businesses face. Each organization has unique security obstacles and obligations. Billions of dollars have been invested into IT security solutions and increasing annual security budgets has been an imperative. In fact, 98% of business respondents reported they will spend over a million dollars in 2017, per a global study by Citrix and the Ponemon Institute. However, many of the systems and people in place are still not able to handle today’s threats.

Security threats increase as more devices crowd networks and as people have more freedom to work from anywhere, on any device. More devices, especially bring your own (BYO) devices are the new norm, and businesses need to put information security at the top of their priority list to ensure apps and data are secure no matter where they reside or are accessed. On top of this, businesses need skilled staff to plan how they will reduce risk and improve the security of their applications and data.

The global study by Citrix and the Ponemon Institute on IT security infrastructure found that less than half (48%) of survey respondents said their organization has security policies in place to ensure employees and third parties only have the appropriate access to sensitive business information. Not helping is that nearly 70% of business respondents said that some of their existing security solutions are outdated and inadequate.

Top security concerns confirmed in the study:

• Poor security deployments: 70% said their organization had made investments in IT security technology that was not successfully deployed (e.g. shelfware).
• Unapproved and rogue app deployments: 65% of respondents said their organization is not able to reduce the inherent risk of unapproved applications – increasing risk, including from shadow IT.
• Unmanaged data at risk: 64% say their organization has no way to effectively reduce the inherent risk of unmanaged data (e.g. downloaded onto USB drives, shared with third parties, or files with no expiration date).
• Talent pool is small: Only 40% said their organization is successfully hiring knowledgeable and experienced security practitioners.

While there’s no silver bullet to fixing security business challenges, survey respondents shared that they believe there are solutions to help better manage security challenges:

• Creating a unified view: 53% percent believe a unified view of users across the enterprise.
• Becoming proactive: 48% percent answered an ability to keep up with new or emerging attacks.

Respondents also shared that some specific improvements can be made to reduce their overall risk:

• Technology improvements: 65% believe an improvement in technologies will improve their overall security posture and reduce risk.
• Staffing investments: 72% say an improvement in staffing will improve their overall security posture and reduce risk.

To learn more about the Ponemon Institute survey findings, visit our landing page or read the blog from Citrix vice president and chief technology officer, Christian Reilly.

These findings are the second installment of the global study from Citrix and the Ponemon Institute. The first report reviewed how business complexity is hindering security postures and adding to the shadow IT trend.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in the Canadian-specific data, here’s some highlights:

BYOD or Bring Your Own Device is a trend in businesses everywhere, and the struggle to roll it out properly to  employees is real. There are so many factors to consider from how to support smartphones, tablets, and laptops, to how to manage them. It can be very overwhelming to the people tasked with implementing BYOD. To help those people out, I connected to Ching Mac of Citrix Canada to get his advice on rolling out BYOD. The advantage of going to Citrix Canada to talk about BYOD is that they themselves have an excellent BYOD policy that allows their employees to use whatever device or devices that work for them and they cover part of the cost. Thus they talk the talk and walk the walk on the BYOD front using their own suite of products. That makes them uniquely qualified to speak to the subject.

First of all, why go the BYOD route? There are many reasons. It increases productivity and employee satisfaction. That’s because you now have an employee that is using the device or devices that they feel will make them most productive. It can save the company money and allow the employee to work anywhere. The latter item being a huge point as that can tie into the employee being more productive. Finally, a key point is that it stops “shadow IT” from popping up in your company. That’s when employees do everything possible to do what they want and avoid corporate IT in the process.

Now, what do you have to keep in mind when you come up with a BYOD policy for your company? One thing to keep in mind is that a successful BYOD policy will touch many areas of the business. Finance, HR, IT just to name three. This will help you do things like define who is eligible to take part as not every employee can or should be part of this. Or which devices are allowed? What corporate services are available to you on a BYOD device? Plus making sure that every employe understands what the policy is. Finally there’s the issues of who’s paying for what, and the IT security considerations that may affect a BYOD policy. If you’re a heavily regulated environment such as health care, that can be a major consideration as data leakage can be “career limiting.” Not to mention what the implications of a lost or stolen device, or using a device on an unsecured network. All of these need to be thought through before rolling out a BYOD policy.

Can a BYOD policy be platform agnostic? That’s an issue as there are some businesses who for example won’t support an Apple product and force users down the path of Windows or Android for example. Properly structured, it can be platform agnostic. If you take offerings for Citrix as an example be it their Xen Mobile or Citrix receiver for example, they support every plaform out there with a similar look and field. Thus users truly have a choice in terms of what device to use without placing an undue burden on IT.

For more infomation on this important topic, Citrix has a great white paper that is full of all sorts of information that businesses need to know when going down this path. In my mind, businesses cannot affort not to look at BYOD. Despite the fact that there’s a lot to consider, BYOD can be a positive for an employer if it is properly implemented.

Citrix has officially kicked off Citrix Summit 2017 in Anaheim, California with several new announcements:

• New transition/trade-up offers will be available for those who want to transition to Citrix Cloud as-a-service
  
• XenDesktop Essentials was released to help with simplified deployment of Windows 10 Desktops on Microsoft Azure cloud
• XenApp Essentials was also released to enable customers to deploy business apps directly from Azure
• The Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance Program is Citrix’s newest Citrix Ready Program and combines the advantages of Citrix Cloud with hyperconverged infrastructure.
  
• The Smart Tools family expands with the introduction of Smart Check, Smart Scale and other pre-configured packages that simplify cloud deployments
• Citrix NetScaler Unified Gateway has been integrated with Microsoft Intune to enable greater security and flexibility for customers

You can find out more about these announcements here. On top of those announcements, Citrix announced the acquisition of Unidesk – the inventor of the Windows application packaging and management technology known as layering.

 Application layering has emerged as the best way to separate apps from the underlying operating system, so they can be managed once and delivered from any end user computing solution to any device.

Unidesk is a privately-held company that makes it possible for IT organizations to manage applications once across virtual desktops, shared hosted desktops, and published applications with unequaled packaging simplicity and full application compatibility. You can find out more about this announcement here.