Remote Access and Beyond
History has proven that companies that don’t continually innovate and push boundaries, get left behind. The examples are countless. Think Blockbuster, Kodak or Radio Shack.
In the world of tech, new problems are solved every day and another company – or perhaps an entire market – is made obsolete. IT developers are not just building products, they are shaping how we work, how we play, and how we connect and interact with each other.
This mandate is something the Citrix team holds close. We pride ourselves on offering services and solutions that are transformative, flexible, and secure, equipping our customers to overcome the challenges of today, tomorrow, and ten years from now.
Over the years, there have been countless occasions where I’ve been asked about what we do, and faced the misconception that Citrix is solely the “remote access” company. The truth is, we do much more than that. Citrix helps companies to be more productive by enabling secure connections to company information. This is done by ensuring the secure delivery of apps and data to any device, on any network, on any cloud, while also delivering a seamless, consistent, flexible experience with the technology. In doing so, our solutions support the evolving natures of our customer’s culture. We’re pushing boundaries for ourselves, and our customers, every day.
How we innovate is shaped by the world we live in. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that “The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context.”
Consider the cultural shift toward working from anywhere; in the past, the office was defined by the physical space within four walls where colleagues sat together, worked together and ate together. Today, the office takes on a variety of forms – home, the local library, favourite coffee shops, the cottage over long weekends. Many businesses today don’t have permanent desks for their employees. Some don’t even have permanent offices.
So, how do we fit in? We provide application and desktop virtualization, networking and cloud solutions so employees can work on their own terms at any time, on any device, anywhere. As our partnerships and work increasingly traverse global borders, the need and ability to work wherever and whenever has taken a front seat for our clients.
Another area we keep top of mind is security. With the recent highly-publicized information leaks, among the many other accounts of cyberattacks in our current digital landscape, IT security has propelled up the corporate priority list. As data becomes increasingly more valuable, security practices must be ever more sophisticated. This is something we explored most recently in our global security survey, where we found a pervasive concern among IT professionals that companies are ill-equipped to deal with cyber-threats.
So, how do we answer this concern? By ensuring that security is top of mind when we are developing and updating our enterprise solutions, making them easy to use while protecting our customers from risk. IT can use policies that prevent the saving, copying, printing or moving of files. With XenApp and XenDesktop, IT can shield data from leaks and theft by employing a centralized data centre. At the same time, it can support multifactor authentication and activity logging for compliance support since it’s commonly accepted that passwords are not sophisticated enough to protect from modern threats (as we saw in the iCloud celebrity leaks). These solutions are just some of the ways we go beyond desktop virtualization to stay on top of the wide-ranging IT challenges our customers face.
The bottom line is that to keep afloat companies must account for the shifting ways technology intersects with our lives. At Citrix, we know that staying idle is not an option, so as a vehicle for change, we will always continue to ask, where can we go next?
