This is a guest blog post by Avishag Daniely, Director of Product Marketing, at Guardicore.
Remote working is powering the new normal, and virtual apps and desktops infrastructure is doing a great job of helping to facilitate that shift. However, securing work from home at scale is a huge task, one that needs to be met with simplicity, transparency, and control. Here’s how Guardicore integrates with Citrix Workspace to make this happen and solve business challenges.
The Risks of a Patchwork Approach to Securing Remote Work
Traditional security measures that aim to protect remote working are limited, often incurring high infrastructure costs and operational burden. It can not fulfil the security requirements of the COVID-19 era: allowing employees to access only what they need, and no more, keeping risk to a minimum while ensuring business continuity (think zero trust). However, the complexity of setting up the right rules, especially when considering a WFH organizational setup, is huge. Eventually, due to over provisioning of hardware, or the manual effort of network configuration, one or more of these three things tends to happen.
- One-size-fits-all access privilege: Loose policy creation fails to secure at the user or process level, opening the organization up to more risk than is necessary.
- Bypassing of security controls: Security teams start skipping steps to accelerate setup, failing to set up adequate controls such as the right firewalls.
- Gaps and blind spots: Organizations are left with limited visibility and control over the user environment, despite knowing that humans are the weakest link.
The result is increased risk. In turn, this exposes the organization to threats such as ransomware, infrastructure misuse for malicious intent such as cryptocurrency mining, data loss, and breaches in compliance.
What’s “Under Your Roof” Just Got a Lot More Complicated
Guardicore Centra provides a thorough map of your whole compute infrastructure, in the cloud or on-premises datacenter, regardless of the infrastructure you’re using including virtual desktops and applications, and no matter the location or complexity.
Guardicore also provides process-level visibility so we can show you valuable context for each flow and for every asset. This could be anything from the environment in which it resides and the users who have access to both real-time and historical data on communications.
Going Further than Visibility to Gain Control through Segmentation
With the map as a foundation, Guardicore provides an enterprise with an agent that can be installed on each VM, cloud instance, container node, or bare-metal server, including all virtual desktops. All these communicate with a centralized management server to provide a single point of view. With process and user-level granularity, enterprises can create single policies based on real-time business needs. No downtime or application changes, and policy creation seamlessly works alongside all automation and DevOps environments.
Guardicore and Citrix: A Better Together Checklist
Cut costs, and complexity: First, using Guardicore saves you money. Jump boxes and firewall configuration aren’t just complicated, they’re expensive. With no costly downtime and no network changes, Guardicore Centra is cost-effective at scale.
You’re also simplifying visibility with a single pane of glass. Every endpoint, from your employee laptops with VPN to Virtual Desktop environments or Citrix Virtual Applications, is covered, down to each user connection and single command line.
Set policies, anywhere: Guardicore allows you to meet very specific requirements, securing the Citrix infrastructure anywhere, including on-premises, on third-party cloud provider environments, and on Citrix Cloud. This includes multiple user policies on a single machine so that you can set user access protocol even from the same jump box or terminal.
This approach can also be used for third-party vendors, providers or administrators. Additional use cases also include peer-to-peer isolation so that one user can access another’s VDI for remote support, for example, and control user access to the internet, such as allowing certain SaaS connections but not others.
Get out of your users’ way: Business continuity relies on your employees being able to work knowing they have access to the applications they need, without frustration or delay.
With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, you can rapidly provision desktops or applications to thousands of employees from any public cloud, on-premises, or hybrid solution. Your users will have the freedom and flexibility to work on the devices and networks at their disposal, while you manage everything in one secure central console.
Guardicore complements Citrix VDI by setting up the right policies and controls to reduce enterprise risk and accelerate compliance, even in an unknown setting with BYOD allowances.
If the worst occurs and a machine is compromised, you’ve got existing protections in place. These meet multiple business goals, such as ensuring compliance, securing your critical applications, or acting against lateral movement.
Work from Home at Scale, with Confidence and Control
Guardicore and Citrix together empower enterprises to welcome the remote working reality with incisive visibility and control, meeting any requirements of scale securely. Together, we can lower your infrastructure and IT costs, add visibility down to user or process level, and truly reduce risk without impacting business continuity.
