Whether it’s expanding service-line offerings or moving to remote work models, there have been significant changes in the way healthcare is delivered to patients and supported by providers. The culture of healthcare has long been, “If the physicians and clinicians need to be onsite, then everyone does.” While remote work did happen within healthcare organizations, it was often limited to a very small population and/or very few use cases.

Two Years of Change

Over the last two years, with numerous nonpatient facing roles shifting to work from home (WFH), healthcare entities needed to pivot quickly. Technology needed to adapt to these new use cases, and systems that those users relied on needed to be extended well beyond the workflows for which they were intended.

To compound those challenges, access to additional hardware to support remote initiatives, reliable connectivity, and expanded security concerns increased complexity for IT teams. These factors also affected the user experience. Employees needed the flexibility to work on any device, on any network, and in any location.

While many non-clinical roles transitioned to WFH, physicians and clinicians were affected, as well. We have all read the heroic stories of field hospitals being built over weekends and triage facilities taking over every space available at health systems across the globe. The use of telehealth increased exponentially in the early stages of the pandemic and continues to see unprecedented growth compared to pre COVID figures. Even now, two years later, health systems are continuing to adapt to what work looks like for everyone within their organizations. In a recent Citrix study, 66 percent of knowledge workers said it will be very important for them to work remotely — on any device — moving forward.

What Customers Are Saying

More and more of the customers I speak with are converting their current hybrid environments permanently to this scenario. We have also learned that people are just as productive in their WFH environments as they were in the office.

With all this change, there have been some challenges on the IT side in getting these production environments up and running to support remote work. This is due to complexity of access and technical infrastructure limits.

Some organizations tried to scale out VPN-based solutions, only to find that the physical infrastructure and the connectivity had to be scaled to handle the additional utilization.

Other organizations leveraged their production virtual infrastructures to expand to their new remote use cases. Despite that, they found they could not support the demand. These challenges often led to various access methodologies, using different endpoint technologies, connecting to multiple systems. To sum it up, complexity ensued. Eight-six percent of the respondents to our survey agreed: A seamless experience is critically important to overall productivity.

At Citrix, we believe there is a better way. A simpler way to access, a simpler way to organize, a simpler way to secure all your workflows, regardless of where they might be.

Seamless Access to Work Tools Is Key to a Great Employee Experience

Access is key to any hybrid strategy. A simple method to authenticate into your enterprise environment and the distributed resources (apps, data, virtual desktops) within it can have an immense impact on the user experience. We found that more than 85 percent of users surveyed said a seamless employee experience was “extremely” or “very important.”

Delivering a singular (Workspace) to your users, to access all things “work” has become a necessity for this new hybrid workforce. While Citrix has long been known for securely delivering virtualized windows apps, desktops, and files to remote users, recently we have expanded that same functionality to web- and SaaS-based apps and services. With Citrix Secure Private Access, you can deliver these solutions into the same workspace that the rest of your enterprise applications and data currently reside, while also adding all the granular security and access controls that you’re accustomed to with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

With security becoming more important as we expand our edge to wherever the endpoint lives, these simplified and integrated security controls become even more important. As our survey finds, close to 90 percent of respondents stated security measures can/have impacted employee experience.

That seamless experience extends well beyond the initial login. Your ability to leverage single sign-on (SSO) with every aspect of your solution portfolio brings enhanced value and improved experience to the end user, as well as to your IT teams. Gone are the countless service desk tickets for account lockouts and password resets. No more shadow IT finding ways to bypass password policies to combat the complexity requirements your organization has implemented to help secure your environment.

Zero Trust Security: An Important Part of the Equation

Adopting a zero trust mindset also comes into focus as you begin to glean the identify of everything, from the user to the endpoint, across trusted and untrusted networks to your enterprise resources at the other end. With Citrix Analytics for Security, not only can you verify who initiated the process, but you also can continue to validate everything, throughout the entire session and empower your organization’s security team by delivering automated session mitigations for real-time threat detection and offensive countermeasures.

With the hybrid-work model continuously changing, you need solutions that can change with your organization and the needs of your users. If you are interested in understanding more about how these, as well as other Citrix solutions can help streamline the secure delivery of mission critical apps and data and services wherever they may reside, reach out to your Citrix account manager, or click here to reach out to us directly


About The State of Security in a Hybrid World Study

The State of Security in a Hybrid World examines attitudes and experiences from security decision makers and knowledge workers in medium-large organizations (500+ employees in the US; 250+ employees in all other markets) as the knowledge economy transitions to a long-term hybrid work strategy. Citrix, in partnership with Sapio Research, ran an independent opinion research study, interviewing 1,250 security decision makers (job titles included Manager, Senior Manager, Director and Vice President), working in large and mid-market businesses. Respondents were based in the US (413 respondents), the UK (203), France (218), Germany (209), and the Netherlands (207). In addition, the study also polled 3.603 knowledge workers based in medium-large organizations in the US, UK, France, Germany and Netherlands.