Security is of paramount importance to IT departments of all sizes. Kaizen Approach knows this well – they provide security consulting services to government and commercial customers to help maintain a strong security posture. This 2009 startup company, owned by service-disabled veterans, has steadily grown 10 times its initial size. Citrix helps fuel its growth and success with innovative cloud offerings.
“We had a desire to put most of our IT in the cloud being a small company. So we naturally gravitated towards a company that we felt had good fundamentals – security, reliability.” explained Melissa McCoy, Chief Technology Officer, at Kaizen Approach.
That company was Citrix.
Securing Data and Access
Kaizen migrated from their existing data collaboration platform to Citrix ShareFile. McCoy initially had some concerns around infrastructure control moving to the cloud, though ShareFile quickly showed its value allowing them to do things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
“The advantage that the cloud gives to smaller companies is you can leverage all of that expertise and be a very small company and have the same type of sophisticated enterprise tools that just weren't available 20 years ago,” says McCoy.
Kaizen Approach also uses Citrix Secure Private Access (formerly Citrix Secure Workspace Access) for secure single sign-on access to their SaaS applications. Upon seeing a demo of Citrix Workspace and the new platform, McCoy said that employees at Kaizen were excited about the simplicity. She’s been migrating users over with a rollout of one app at a time – one digital workspace where all important applications live.
The Glue that Binds Things Together
McCoy and her team have seen significant value from Citrix ShareFile and Citrix Secure Workspace Access – but we haven’t yet mentioned her favorite Citrix product.
“Citrix Analytics for Security is my current favorite product.” says McCoy. She uses it to set up conditions and define actions to take based on those conditions – working proactively instead of reactively across the cloud-based Citrix services that she uses. It showed its value when one of their employees took an international vacation and tried to access data in ShareFile. McCoy had defined a policy to detect logins from outside the U.S. and block them. Everything worked as expected with a full audit trail available in Citrix Analytics.
Kaizen Approach is also very pleased with Citrix field teams and technical support as well as product management and engineering teams listening to and implementing product feedback.
“I was actually able to sit and talk with the developers and tell them what was important, what I was looking for, and they made those changes for me and I'm very grateful. This is really becoming an important product for us.” said McCoy referring to Citrix Analytics.
The Road Ahead
Moving forward, Kaizen Approach realizes that they need to continue building a proactive, protected layer around their cloud and IT services. Technology is core to their business and that of their customers. McCoy said that Kaizen will continue working with “forward-thinking vendors like Citrix” as a key element of their IT strategy.
