In January we announced that the XenMobile Service was fully integrated with Citrix Cloud and I’d like to go into a few more details about why this is such a huge deal for us!
- Simple 3-step onboarding process
- Single pane of glass to manage your Cloud workspace
- Cloud Connector
I’d like to focus this blog post on number 3 and the benefits of the Cloud Connector.
Historically, to connect the customer’s resources with our hosted offering, an IPsec tunnel was required for Enterprise Connectivity:
There were many challenges with this approach from an onboarding perspective, as all of a sudden, it was not just IT involved, but a discussion with the Networking and Security teams around opening up specific ports, what IPsec appliance to use, what IP address is being reserved among other info. This led to longer POCs and time to deploy.
With our Citrix Cloud integration, we’re able to offer customers the ability to deploy a simple Cloud Connector in their environment for their enterprise connectivity needs. Installing takes just a few minutes and it doesn’t require you to open any inbound ports on your firewall as Cloud Connector establishes an outbound connection to Citrix Cloud and once that outbound connection is established, XenMobile can use it for accessing the configured enterprise services (like AD, PKI and XenApp/XenDesktop).
The Cloud Connector is a stateless component and hence you can deploy multiple instances of it for high-availability and load-balancing. We recommend always deploying a pair of Cloud Connectors per data center. It also doesn’t require much maintenance as it is an evergreen component kept up-to-date by Citrix Cloud.
There is a slight change in the architecture for customers deploying the Cloud Connector and that require Micro-VPN functionality (for accessing Exchange and Internal websites) whereby the NetScaler Gateway now resides in the customer data center whereas previously it was hosted in our Cloud.
Fear not, our licenses now include 2 x NetScaler VPX 3000s for this use case and our XenMobile Service Rapid Deployment Team will be on hand to assist you in getting this setup and configured for our XenMobile Service. In addition, we’ve added the ability to download a script from the XenMobile Server console that can be uploaded and executed on the NetScaler.
For our existing customers that are currently using an IPsec tunnel, we’re working on plans to be able to make the Cloud Connector available to you so watch this space!
So, what are you waiting for? Sign-up for Citrix Cloud today to get your trial process started!
Look out for future blog posts around the technical information of Cloud Connector as well as detailed information on the NetScaler Gateway configuration scripts.
