The past year has challenged companies to rapidly deploy work-from-home, BYOD, and flexible work programs at a rapid pace. For more than 30 years, Citrix has focused on connecting employees to the resources they need to do their best work anywhere, anytime on any device.
Leveraging our digital workspace solutions, companies can provide unified, secure and reliable access to the systems and applications people need to get work done, wherever it needs to get done and deliver a superior end user experience. When you combine Citrix Gateway and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, you can provide full functionality for Citrix environments and reap the full benefits they provide.
As a front end for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix Gateway is the most complete offering that provides great performance, increased visibility, and monitoring that only Citrix can provide, including the following:
- Contextual access for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops: Citrix Gateway has advanced endpoint analysis (EPA) and device posture checks that enable trusted devices to access apps or desktops remotely. It conducts systems scans for OS, registry, malware, and HDD encryption, as well as product scans for virus, without the need for an MDM or EDR solution. Solutions like Zscaler Private Access do not provide these advanced capabilities and require another third-party MDM/EDR solution to get contextual properties of a device.
- Ability to enforce contextual access within user session: SmartAccess (policies that control users actions within Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops sessions) and user access control features are Citrix-specific policies that are enforced within our ICA/HDX protocol. Examples of these Citrix-specific policies include disabling network drive mapping, disabling copy/paste/print, and many more. These policies are important, especially if you are in healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and other industries where regulatory compliance and security are top priorities. These policies are controlled and enforced by Citrix Gateway, and you can’t use them with a third-party vendor. Learn more about SmartAccess and other user access control filters.
- Deliver great performance on high latency networks: Citrix offers Enlightened Data Transport (EDT) to ensure a high definition in-session user experience for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops with high-quality audio and video. EDT is crucial, especially with many employees working remotely and using home Wi-Fi with higher latency than a corporate LAN. Only Citrix Gateway supports EDT, which helps you provide the best performance possible for your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.
- Performance monitoring for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops: Most of our customers use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to optimize app delivery. However, there are factors like underlying network, the server hosting the apps, and the end user connection that affect app performance. For monitoring and troubleshooting performance issues, Citrix customers use the HDX Insight capability that comes with Citrix Gateway and Citrix ADC. To understand performance issues and their root causes, you have to be able to decrypt ICA packets to get information from individual packets. To get this matrix, a proxy must be able to decrypt the ICA layer so admins can understand the cause of latency or bottlenecks; only Citrix Gateway understand this protocol. No other third-party solutions provide granular performance metrics like Citrix Gateway. Learn about the metrics and channels HDX Insight tracks.
- Zero day support for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops: During our product releases for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, we test upgrade scenarios and integration between existing and previous versions of Citrix Gateway to ensure we don’t disrupt customer environments. With a third-party solution, the vendor must validate and test after we release Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. That can disrupt your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environments and lead to support requests.
Conclusion
Many customers front end Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop with a third-party solution like Zscaler Private Access, Pulse Secure, or Cisco VPN appliances but they have found that only Citrix Gateway can meet all their security and end-user requirements.
As a front end for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix Gateway provides unmatched capabilities around security, including SmartAccess and EPA, while offering fantastic performance with EDT/DTLS support. Citrix Gateway can also provide end-to-end visibility into the ICA protocol with HDX Insight and built-in monitoring for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops services that no other third-party solution can provide.
Check out our whitepaper to learn the Top 10 reasons why Citrix Gateway should be your solution of choice for securing your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops infrastructure.
If you’re looking to move to the cloud, Citrix has several fully cloud delivered options. If you’re looking for zero trust access to all applications such as web and SaaS with advanced security controls for BYO, managed, and unmanaged devices check out Citrix Secure Workspace Access for zero trust access to all apps and threat protection with Citrix Secure Internet Access .
