Wiring the world’s digital mine
In the mining industry, operations don’t just span continents—they cut deep into some of the most remote, bandwidth-starved places on Earth. For one global mining giant with a presence in many countries, that means keeping IT users connected with a digital infrastructure that is as resilient and far-reaching as its physical footprint.
While Citrix has long been part of this company’s end-user computing strategy, its networking layer still relied on F5. But with looming license renewals, rising subscription costs, and a forced migration to BIG-IP Next—requiring a full rebuild rather than a simple upgrade–the team took a step back. The effort required to stay with F5 would equal that of switching vendors, yet deliver none of the added benefits: reduced downtime, accelerated service delivery, improved business continuity, and the ability to seamlessly scale into new markets at low cost.
NetScaler offered a cleaner, more future-ready route—combining architectural flexibility with simplified licensing and tight Citrix integration. For a globally distributed business, this wasn’t just about cost—it was a strategic move toward greater efficiency, agility, and long-term value. Their five-year commitment to NetScaler reflects that ambition: a deliberate move to modernize the network and build a stronger foundation for growth.
A single pane of glass, a world of possibilities
For a lean IT team managing infrastructure across 35 countries, consistency is everything. That’s what made Citrix’s “power of one” strategy so compelling: one codebase, one management plane, one-pass architecture. Whether deployed on physical appliances or in the cloud, NetScaler behaved the same—reducing fragmentation, simplifying operations, and cutting down the time spent chasing configuration inconsistencies.
Automation was equally important. With just ten people overseeing global IT operations, the team needed a solution that scaled effortlessly. NetScaler’s native integration with Terraform delivered exactly that—allowing them to script, deploy, and manage infrastructure worldwide with speed and precision.
Performance was the final piece. Backed by third-party validation from the latest Tolly report, NetScaler not only matched expectations—it decisively outpaced the competition. When turning on standard functionality like application security and content rewriting or inspection, NetScaler’s single-pass architecture delivered up to 96% less latency than F5 as the total number of connections increased, and delivered 64% more efficient CPU usage for a given throughput. The result: faster apps, flawless performance under pressure, greater capacity from existing infrastructure, and lower costs with less need for additional resources or management
For a business built on extracting value from some of the world’s most remote and demanding environments, NetScaler extended that same reliability throughout the enterprise, powering a resilient, seamlessly integrated platform that performs—no matter how rugged the terrain.
Breaking ground on a smarter network core
For this global mining organization, NetScaler is being put to work where it matters most: load balancing, proxying, authentication, secure gateway access, and web application firewalling. These are core infrastructure needs—especially for a company operating across dozens of countries and dealing with high latency and remote access challenges.
The company’s existing setup was sizable, with 50+ instances. Rather than replacing everything in one go, the team opted for a three-phase rollout across geographies.
With multiple F5 renewal events on the horizon and a need for long-term stability, the company is aiming for a full transition by mid-to-late 2026. Thanks to automation through NetScaler’s Terraform integration, the team has the flexibility to accelerate the rollout if early phases went smoothly, reducing operational risk while maintaining deployment agility, reducing hours of manual configuration work into minutes
