Citrix Synergy – A rather garbled message but a chance to kickstart real productivity
- Summary:
- Citrix is on a long transition that has to match the one many of its customers are also making. With this year’s Synergy conference it has many of the tools it – and they – will need, but still needs to learn to forget about the technology underpinnings and remember its goal is now all about business, such as providing those customers with some real productivity gains.
Underpinning this is an interesting dilemma for Citrix, in that it still gives off the vibe of a large legacy business trying to determine whether it has been left behind by technology and usage patterns or not. It's not unlike a favourite aunt who has decided it is time she came to terms with using email and Facebook in order to pass on her knowledge of favourite hobby. And as she does so she realises it is not the technology that is important, but what you can do with it.
Historically, Citrix has been able to do quite a bit for users, especially when it comes to the management of applications and data used in desktop systems to run businesses. That aspiration hasn’t changed much for the company, but it is possible to see that the users’ needs are leading back towards the types of services the company can offer.
This is where the notion of productivity comes in, for the ability to build collaborative services from applications, coupled with new tools for data and function management, should offer individual user staff in businesses the chance to make a useful contribution to increasing productivity, at least in their corner of the world.
I have to say that as CEO Kiril Tatarinov went through the list of new products and services, existing products with major additions and those with extended potential during his keynote, the breadth and depth of the company’s story became a little lost.
But it became possible to see that Citrix is not so much an old and established provider of legacy desktop management tools and services but one trying to provide productivity across the office as a workplace.
Its effectiveness in this task can no doubt be argued over, and it is a fact that general levels of growth in productivity in business and industry have been miniscule since the earliest days of IT. That being said, it is possible to see that the application of new developments in AI and machine learning may well make advances in productivity a real possibility.
And AI, analytics and machine learning are key parts of the company’s new pitch at creating some real improvement in productivity – at least in its world of servicing business management and control.
Tatarinov summed up the productivity issue succinctly by suggesting that it is about 'buying time', which is the one things that cannot be changed or added to. In the Technical keynote at the event, the company showed how some of the ways in which it aims to speed up processes.
Key to this are the tools found in the Workspace Suite. This is the flagship desktop management environment that is available either as a SaaS service or an on-premise, private cloud offering. Indeed, some of the confusion about what the company is offering comes from the fact that the Workplace Suite is considered to be the only SKU that users need to think about, yet it can also be considered as not a new product but more a rebranding of a unified collection of new and existing tools from the company such as NetScaler and Xen Desktop.
This did lead to some confusion amongst the assembled analysts and press, and led to the thought of considering the whole subject on the basis of what it aims to achieve rather than what it is or consists of.
Productivity issues
One of the key parts of improving productivity can be seen in the way the company has tried to make Workspace as universal as possible across a wide range of all common end user devices. In addition, it offers single user sign on, regardless of where they are or what device they are using. Getting this commonality of use is a key, If apparently smalI, lever on 'buying time' as staff do not have to think about the how of performing a task.
But it is also an adaptive tool that exploits elements of machine learning and analytics. It automatically adapts the user’s delivered workplace to the device type and usage, together with whatever policy the business wishes to apply. For example, if the user is signing on to more business critical applications while using a mobile device in a remote location, the policy may state that it can only be opened as a virtual desk top run on the company datacentre and within the full panoply of the security tools then available.
The company has also introduced an RF device that sits in a company’s branch office and can recognise when a user had gone to that office an can recognise the arrival and setup the staff member’s workspace on the dev ice they are travelling with.
Simple productivity gains can be found in the application of some of the tools available. Collectively, this about the fact that they perform their tasks, such as onboarding new staff, filing content or logging in to services, much faster than the native tools in Windows 10 can manage, though there is always the argument that the two or more minutes taken for logging on can be valuably used to make cups of coffee and o reset the brain.
But other tasks can be speeded up a good deal more. For example, with the recent acquisition by the company of Unidesk, it is now possible to manage updates of multiple applications with one operation rather than having to patch Windows for each application. It is also now possible to use template-based tools to speed the set-up of SaaS applications.
There is also now a secure browser as part of Workspace with tools that provide protection against not only the known malware always attempting entry but can also detect and block the as yet unknown zero day exploits. Much of this, of course, has a positive effect on productivity, though because it is stopping exploits it is difficult to measure effectively unless a business has been the subject of a number of attacks with known impact on the bottom line and known loss of time spent on remediation.
The `setting up’ processes are obviously good consumers of time, though this is usually balanced by the fact they don’t have to be done every day. Setting up workflows are a good case in point, and the company has started to use AI and machine learning technologies to automate the building of workflows as far as possible. This also means that more people in the business stream will be able to create new workflows
The aim is to service the need of users to have the applications they need, on the device they want to use, especially as, more and more, they also want them `now’ regardless whether they are on premise or cloud applications.
Delivering this now demands offering a unified user experience using adaptive, context-sensitive single sign-on capabilities that can cope with identifying the device being used, and the network where the work is being done, plus its performance.
In practice, many of the components of Workspace Suite already exist but Citrix is now bringing them together and integrating them into this unified brand.
Turning security on its head
Another key area with a direct impact on productivity is cybersecurity, and the company has for years had the public mantra that this is `baked in’ to all its technology.
Tatarinov went so far as to define the issue as evidence of World War 3 being well under way already and that there was no obvious end in sight right now. The company announce a two part contribution to the reduction of cyber attacks, one of which has been based on a major rethink of how security should be worked and applied, which turns some long-held principles of cybersecurity practice on their head by using AI, machine learning and analytics.
The idea is to move away from notion of `locks’ on access to data, and move to one of `detectors’, and they are developing new types of detector every day. This means that any attack only needs to detected by one of them to be caught. The detectors exploit AI and machine learning to detect attacks, and can learn new attack vectors as they emerge. The company accepts that, with a single detector type there will be false positives every now and then. This another reason to use multiple different types.
Citrix claims this creates an infrastructure that is secure by default without inhibiting or restricting user activities. It also avoids the need to invest in the typical roster of 30-40 different security applications. The company does, however, still operate security with the simple notion of imposed whitelists, where users are simply banned from accessing known sources of malware.
NetScaler is now the vehicle for delivering this security, in the form of a new version of NetScaler Secure Web Gateway offering encrypted traffic control, which it claims can give 360 degree control and visibility. It also adds the notion of `follow the user’ – where the security policies that apply to an individual user can be applied wherever the user is or what device they are using.
This is described as centralised policy and decentralised enforcement, which leads to the second security development, the software-defined perimeter. This surrounds an individual user’s work domain of tools, applications and data, providing facilities such as Gateway as a Service, WebApp firewall, DDoS as a Service, SD-WAN as a service.
Then there is analytics. The use of AI, machine learning and analytics is almost exclusively directed at security and performance management, giving IT better visibility on what is happening to data, who is downloading it and sharing it. The company has invested in a small team of consultants to help craft solutions and best practices. Known as Citrix Professional Services, its core target is not the customers directly but more the partner channel which many customers work with daily.
It can be used to control what applications users have access to, which can include partial restrictions based on type of access being attempted. It is also used to evaluate user behaviour based on data about the individual, all the people in a company, and data accumulated from all Citrix customers. This is fully anonymised so there should be no privacy issues.
It is also possible for Citrix to use this data to identify documents known to hide malware payloads and advise customer IT departments accordingly.
My take
Here is an example of a company that started to lose touch with its core market because of technologies such as analytics, mobiles and the cloud, but is now learning the art of re-positioning itself in a place where its core market will need to be as they adopt those technologies into production in the hope they will fulfil on the promise of greater productivity. But many companies will now need tools like this to make those promises real.