How does security stay ahead of threats to the expanded attack surface of new work models?

The rapid shift to hybrid and remote working models has empowered employees. It has enabled them to do their best work wherever they are. A distributed workforce also brings benefit to organizations through greater resilience and business continuity, along with agility and the environmental benefits of reduced commuting and real estate.

But what does that mean for information security? How are successful organizations balancing security requirements with the need to ensure a friction-free employee experience?

Here’s how four different organizations from around the world are using Citrix to solve their different security challenges.

Protecting smart chip IP for Synopsys

As a leader in silicon chip design for the world of Smart Everything, Synopsys has valuable intellectual property to protect. It also understands the importance of providing a high-quality employee experience that enables staff to be as effective and productive as possible, wherever they are working.

It’s important to get the balance right and, as Synopsys CIO Sriram Sitaraman explains:

“With its zero trust security posture, Citrix has uniquely positioned Synopsys as an engineering company that really cares about both security and the employee experience we deliver.”

From the need to isolate clusters of compute and storage for different engineering teams, Synopsys has rolled a zero trust approach across its organization.

“We are now looking at multiple clouds that allow Synopsys employees, contractors, customers, partners and various combinations of those groups to be collaborating with each other. In all of these instances, we know that the only things we can trust are the things that we control. Citrix technology is critical because it provides single pane of glass visibility into the security of the entire environment.”

By unifying access to all Synopsys’ corporate applications, Citrix has helped tighten the security posture around these apps and also helped improve overall employee experience.

“A Citrix zero trust architecture helps prevent malware, data exfiltration or VPN breaches and attacks. Citrix Secure Private Access, user identity verification and secure workspaces are the mechanisms that help alleviate these risks.”

Read the full Synopsys story.

Citrix secures security consulting firm

Kaizen Approach is a U.S. firm that provides security consulting services to government and commercial customers. As a fast-growing small business, Kaizen Approach was quick to adopt a cloud strategy, as CTO Melissa McCoy explains:

“The advantage that the cloud gives to smaller companies is you can leverage all of that expertise and be a very small company and have the same type of sophisticated enterprise tools that just weren’t available 20 years ago.”

The business uses a portfolio of Citrix products to secure its information.

Citrix Secure Private Access provides secure single sign-on access to Kaizen Approach’s SaaS applications, bringing a simplicity that supports a great employee experience.

Employees use Citrix Content Collaboration to access, share and collaborate on documents, easily and securely.

Citrix Analytics for Security is my current favorite product,” McCoy says. It sits across the cloud-based Citrix services that Kaizen Approach uses, proactively monitoring activity against a set of conditions and consequent actions defined by the Kaizen team, and producing a full audit trail of activity.

Read how Citrix helps secure this security firm’s information in their customer story.

Aptronics secures remote working with Citrix

In the face of one world’s toughest COVID-19 lockdowns, South African IT provider Aptronics enabled its staff to work securely and effectively from home.

In fact, as Jacques Bodenstein, Aptronics’ Lead for Compute and Platform says,

“Today, Citrix technology enables Aptronics to deliver an even better employee experience than workers had at the office. A better employee experience ultimately translates into better customer service.

“When it was all said and done, we had almost zero business impact from transitioning employees to a work-from-home model. The reason for that is simple: Citrix technology works.”

Like Kaizen Approach, Aptronics uses Citrix Analytics for Security. Initially, with stretched resources, Aptronics used the product’s preconfigured security policies to quickly get protection and realize value. Soon after, Bodenstein and the Aptronics team customized the policies to their business needs.

“Citrix Security Analytics is incredibly easy to manage. It simply alerts us when there is an anomaly to view, and we address it. Based on policies we’ve customized, Citrix Security Analytics triggers actions to limit or stop risky behavior. Citrix Security Analytics is sophisticated enough to take into account real-time telemetry data and business context such as app sensitivity and user work hours before flagging user behavior as out-of-the-ordinary.”

Read the full Aptronics story.

Medway Community Healthcare gets leaner and fitter

The UK’s Medway Community Healthcare (MCH) had upgraded its IT system just one week before the UK’s COVID-19 lockdown. It quickly proved its worth as Head of IT Gerd Knight explained:

“Citrix Cloud helped us to provision the extra capacity exceptionally quickly and Citrix Workspace gives us the ability to provide the same desktop across a variety of end-user technology, from a smartphone to a laptop or desktop, whether MCH-owned or a personal device. Configuration was as simple as entering their domain username and password. It worked fantastically well, and it meant that people could carry on working, wherever they were.

“Without Citrix and [Silver Citrix Solution Advisor] BDR, we wouldn’t have been able to meet the challenge of COVID-19. Citrix enabled us to deploy applications, upgrades or changes in one place and know that it would work everywhere.”

As a result, MCH clinicians could work wherever they were able and still have secure access to the sensitive patient information they required.

As Knight says, “With Citrix Workspace, the overall experience for staff is ease of use. The desktop is familiar. It’s reliable, fast, and responsive which means that people can do their jobs anywhere. That gives them more control over their daily work lives and workstyle.”

Data security is always a concern for healthcare organizations, especially if they have people working from home on their own devices. But, with Citrix, “The data never leaves the datacenter. Nothing is stored on the end-user device and people can’t copy/paste information from the Citrix environment. We have switched on all the Citrix anti-keylogging and anti-screenshot protections. The system is as secure as we can make it and that protects patients’ private information.”

For more on Medway, read the full customer story.

Enabling a security posture for new models of work

These are just four examples of how different organizations — large and small, from engineering to healthcare — are using Citrix to protect their distributed workforces while ensuring they have the best possible employee experience, helping them to be as productive as possible.

For further information and inspiration, read the full Citrix customer story on each:

Would you like to learn more about how customers are using Citrix? Check out our posts on green tech and sustainability, work and productivity solutions, and cloud strategy.