If you’re a regular reader of the Citrix blog, you know that we believe in choice for our customers. This belief comes from regular conversations with customers, who share not only their vision for what they want their IT infrastructure to become, but also the complexities and challenges they face right now.

One of their biggest challenges? Sprawl.

SaaS apps like Workday, Salesforce, Concur, Office 365, G Suite, and others are fundamental and indispensable. The average organization is also dramatically increasing the number of applications they employ. In fact, the median number of apps per organization has grown 24 percent over the last two years. Citrix now estimates that the average organization supports over 500 applications.

Despite the growth in SaaS apps, certain essential on-premises legacy apps stay “sticky” and are likely to remain in use for years to come. With only a few SaaS apps, managing identity and access used to be a relatively straightforward matter. The growing adoption of SaaS apps makes this task considerably more problematic and time consuming because you have to manage identity and access for two distinct environments.

As users attempt to access all the apps necessary to do their jobs, they must grapple with multiple logins and inconsistent interfaces that impact their productivity. IT must contend with the additional complexity of administering identity and access across a growing portfolio of SaaS apps, potentially exposing organizations to security vulnerabilities.

Citrix’s partnership with Okta — announced earlier this year at Citrix Synergy — gives our joint customers a compelling alternative that provides everything users need to be productive and organizations need to keep their environments secure, including:

  • Unified identity and access
  • Unified experience across application types
  • Unified access to data and documents
  • Secure, contextual access from any device

Here’s how Citrix and Okta work together: Citrix Workspace delivers a transformative employee experience that organizes, guides, and automates work. Employees can count on Citrix Workspace for unified access to all their SaaS apps, on-premises web apps, virtual apps and desktops, and files, no matter where they’re stored. With the Okta integration, end users also get a familiar login experience — they use their Okta credentials to access Citrix Workspace.

But what does the typical authentication scenario look like?

  1. An unauthenticated user launches the Citrix Workspace app on the endpoint of their choice.
  2. The Citrix Workspace app connects to the Workspace Experience in Citrix Cloud, which requests a new sign-on from the identity microservice.
  3. Once configured, the identity microservice redirects the authentication request to the Okta authentication page.
  4. The user enters their credentials, including any additional authentication factors such as biometrics.

Once authenticated, the Citrix Workspace app requests a list of subscribed resources for the user, including both Citrix Workspace virtual apps and desktops, on-premises web apps, files, and any selected SaaS app integrations provided through Okta.

The Citrix and Okta partnership helps IT leverage existing technology investments and gives end users unified access to all of the resources they need to stay productive, all while helping their organization stay secure.

Learn more about Citrix Workspace and how it can transform employee experience at your organization.