
Over 200,000 customer organizations across the globe use Citrix solutions to deliver Windows, Web and Desktop applications securely with the highest performance and greatest cost efficiency. With Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure, companies can deliver their business-critical applications to any user or office location anywhere in the world, anytime. Our customers are saving millions in IT costs, while achieving new levels of business agility and improving employee productivity; confident their data is being delivered securely.
Helping IT deliver the Best Performance, Highest Security and Lowest Cost
Most IT organizations have taken an incremental approach to application delivery. There is widespread agreement that traditional approaches to application deployment are too static, too complex, and cost too much to maintain. This becomes painfully clear when businesses are faced with change. Citrix offers a new and different approach – Application Delivery Infrastructure – which gives IT a pragmatic, strategic solution to become an enabler of business change rather than a road block.
As IT organizations struggle to keep pace with the demands of business, application delivery has become a major priority for CIOs around the world. Delivering applications to people – wherever they work and play – is a defining issue for IT. Businesses that succeed will be fluent with application delivery. Others will lag behind, struggling with the pace of change in an increasingly dynamic world. Leading analysts such as Forrester, Gartner and EMA describe how to make strategic investments to solve the problems surrounding application delivery.
Whether large ERP solutions or custom web apps, email or e-commerce, client-server applications or SOA, your success in IT today depends on ensuring that your applications help meet your business goals. If the infrastructure you rely on to deliver business applications to end-users wasn’t designed with modern application realities in mind, you end up massively over-provisioning, buying too much bandwidth, adding too many servers, and refreshing PCs on an increasingly short lifecycle just to keep up with growing application requirements.
Citrix believes that businesses can avoid these costs and enhance IT agility with an end-to-end application delivery strategy – a strategy that includes infrastructure solutions deployed along the line-of-sight between datacenters and end-users – a strategy that makes it easy to deliver any application to any user with the best performance, highest security, and lowest cost – a strategy featuring products that work great with your existing infrastructure, and even better when deployed together. Starting from the datacenter and working out toward the end-user, there are four critical best practice objectives to keep in mind.
An end-to-end application delivery strategy starts with infrastructure products that are deployed in the datacenter, directly in front of applications – controlling the initial delivery of applications as close as possible to their source.
A second key consideration in a successful application delivery strategy is making it easy for users to securely access their applications from any location. Citrix Access Gateway is a next generation SSL VPN that is much easier to install and is specifically designed to provide application-layer access to the exact application resources each user needs. It goes beyond simple network access, with SmartAccess, a unique capability that gives IT control over which actions a user can perform within each application based on his or her unique access scenario. A user accessing a corporate application from an office computer, for example, might be able to use all application functions, while that same user connecting from an untrusted external location might be able to view application data, but not save or print.
As a result of trends like user mobility, globalization, and outsourcing, more than half of all employees at mid to large sized enterprises now access their applications from branch offices. Traditional networks were never designed to deliver the kind of application traffic they are expected to handle today, especially as companies consolidate datacenters and start pushing applications like voice and video over the network. Citrix WANScaler is a WAN optimization product specifically designed to address this problem by automatically optimizing all application traffic over the wide area network, an approach that can dramatically improve application performance and reduce bandwidth requirements by as much as 75 percent.
The success of any application delivery strategy rests on the ability of IT to truly monitor the experience of end users, especially with regards to application performance. Citrix EdgeSight gives IT visibility into exactly what the application experience feels like for end-users making it much easier to maintain service level agreements with business stakeholders, spot bottlenecks before they become issues, and quickly diagnose problems when they do occur.
Unlike a few short years ago, businesses today run on applications. In an increasingly volatile world where you face a dizzying array of changes to applications, users, and business climates, making application delivery a strategic imperative is no longer an option.