SaaS is growing at a fast pace, with no signs of slowing down. Adopting SaaS applications has made life much easier for millions of customers just like you. However, you may be concerned by lack of governance and security controls within SaaS apps to protect data from unauthorized usage. Some of you have deployed single sign-on (SSO) solutions to provide consistent security policies and a better end user experience, but these solutions do not offer security policies to control user actions after a user has successfully logged in to a SaaS application. As a result, most of the you are still hesitant to store business-critical information on SaaS applications.

At Citrix Synergy, we announced our intention to release Citrix Access Control within 90 days (and, in doing so, help our customers solve this very problem). True to our word, we announced the general availability of this cloud service on August 6th.

Cloud App Control is a set of security policies within Citrix Access Control that helps IT control what a user can or cannot do following a successful login to these SaaS applications. Unlike traditional Single-Sign On (SSO) solutions, Citrix Access Control not only provides SSO to all applications, but it also provides controls to help prevent unauthorized disclosure of information stored in SaaS applications. It also provides controls to limit users from accessing malicious content on the internet. Citrix Access Control allows configuration of enhanced security policies as shown in the screenshot below.

You will configure these policies while you are configuring SaaS applications for SSO. For detailed “how-to” steps, please refer to our documentation.

For an end user, once these policies are enforced, they can access SaaS applications using embedded browser within the Citrix Workspace app. This way, an admin can enforce end users always accessing SaaS applications using Workspace app only and thereby enforcing granular security controls. For example, in the image below, you decided to enforce “watermark” within a SaaS application. A user, when they access this SaaS application, will see a watermark. They will see this watermark even if they try printing a page. Watermarking acts as a deterrent for a user trying to steal information and sharing with unauthorized parties.

In addition to the enhanced security policies above, Citrix Access Control offers policies to control users accessing internet content. We will be covering the web filtering policies in more details in my next blog post. Stay tuned.

Overall, it is a complete secure access solution, that provides the following benefits:

  1. Improve end user experience with single sign-on to all SaaS, web and Citrix virtual applications
  2. Enforce enhanced security controls for accessing data within SaaS applications
  3. Protects users from accessing malicious and blacklisted websites on the Internet that may affect compliance, for e.g. pornography, illegal betting sites etc.
  4. Provides secure browsing of websites that are whitelisted, but may still have risky content for e.g. social media etc.
  5. Provide end to end visibility and user behavior analytics for application traffic

To learn more about this new cloud service from Citrix, we welcome you to join our webinar: Scared of data security in SaaS applications? Don’t worry, we have your back — REGISTER NOW!

Session 1

Thursday, August 23 at 9:00 am EDT

Session 2

Thursday, August 23 at 2:00 pm EDT