Business disruptions can have an impact on organizations of any size, in any location. How you respond and the strength of your business continuity plan are crucial for the very survival of your business. This blog post is the first in a five-part series that will look at how Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) helps you meet business continuity goals so your business can survive (and even thrive) in the face of unforeseen disruptions.

Workforce Productivity Is Crucial for Business Growth

Workforce productivity is synonymous with application availability and end-user experience. Business continuity plans often focus on remote work, for good reason. Many Citrix customers use Citrix ADC for remote access — and not just to Citrix applications. However, the COVID-19 pandemic is stretching these plans, and customers are looking for advice on how to maintain access. We’re also seeing new considerations for business continuity in how you maintain application performance in the face of 100 percent of the workforce being remote.

Moreover, business continuity goes beyond workforce access. You also have to consider customer-facing applications because more of your transactions are happening online. How will you ensure apps are always available? How do you position workloads to minimize latency for users? Are the resources resilient? Is the application secure?

Five Objectives for Business Continuity

The most basic objectives for business continuity are to keep essential functions up and running during a disruption and to recover with as little productivity loss as possible. The goal of business continuity: keep your workforce productive and your customers engaged.

With that in mind, we’ve identified five important business continuity objectives for any organization:

  • Ensure workforce productivity, application availability and experience
  • Scale IT infrastructure during unforeseen demand
  • Respond faster to restore the application performance
  • Maintain visibility and control
  • Always remain secure and compliant

Over the next few weeks, this blog series will look at these objectives and will show how Citrix ADC can help you to meet each one. This post will focus on workforce productivity, application availability, and experience.

Ensure Workforce Productivity, App Availability and Experience

As we adjust to our new “normal” — a workforce largely composed of remote workers — we need to examine issues that can have an impact on the application experience for employees and customers and how Citrix ADC can help you to mitigate them.

From server and application failure to data center and cloud issues, you can face many threats to application availability and performance. After all, it doesn’t matter how great your applications are if they aren’t performing.

Putting things right quickly should be your priority. You also need to consider that, sometimes, like during the current COVID-19 pandemic, everyone is working remotely, and you can’t just rack up a new server if something fails. That means you must automate as much as possible to support resilience. With Citrix ADC, you are well ahead of the curve in making sure that you can keep your business running. Citrix ADC helps mitigate multiple disruptions and performance issues. Here are some examples:

Server Failure

A server can fail or experience performance issues at any time. Citrix server load balancing will never send requests to failed servers. Citrix ADC checks the health of the servers — the physical state and software connectivity — constantly. If anything fails, the ADC will send requests to an alternate server.

ADC High Availability

ADC node-level failure is easily mitigated. You can deploy Citrix ADC as a high-availability (HA) pair, or clustered. With an active-passive pair, it’s essential to test failover periodically in case configs drift out of sync. With clustering, traffic processing is active-active, and, therefore you know you know that if an ADC fails your applications will still be available.

Application Failure and Performance Issues

Applications and their components can fail. Citrix ADC’s intelligent health monitoring uses customizable checks you can tailor to an individual application. If any part of the application fails, the ADC will use different servers or divert requests to other sites for processing. With application performance issues, Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) can help pinpoint the specific server instance causing the poor user experience. With the help of a machine-learning engine, Citrix ADM can highlight response-time anomalies and alert the admin to take corrective actions. This ensures the UX doesn’t deteriorate and you stay on top of any issues.

Data Center Failure and Performance Issues

Occasionally, a data center may fail — perhaps because of a power outage — or suffer performance issues due to an underperforming link. Citrix ADC’s Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) constantly monitors the health of the data center and the servers in it so traffic can be diverted to a backup data center in the event of a failure.

Network and Internet Issues

During disruptions, users and customers frequently must traverse lower quality networks. For example, your branches might have fast connectivity, but your employees’ home offices might be restricted to home broadband or even 3G. Citrix ADC has a variety of optimization techniques that can help improve app delivery across suboptimal networks.

Compression can reduce the number of round trips required to get content. Caching can improve the speed of processing requests, because cached objects can be delivered more quickly. Various front-end content optimizations help the app render more quickly. And there are various TCP protocol optimizations that help improve data transport from the app to the user in slow or congested networks. All these combined can improve app performance and user experience.

Private Cloud Issues

If the private cloud where you host your apps — or, for that matter, the public cloud you use — has a failure, you can shift to another. Citrix ADC is available in all the major public clouds, and you can shift your workloads from the failed cloud to AWS, Azure, or GCP. The single code base makes app delivery with Citrix ADC portable and enables you to maintain operational consistency.

Reliable access to apps is vital, especially in our current climate, and every Citrix ADC includes built-in remote access technology. But a strong business continuity plan requires more. Remote work can strain application performance and solving this challenge is critical to keeping your business going. Citrix ADC can help you mitigate issues that can arise and have negative effects on app availability and performance.

Scaling your applications and infrastructure to meet demand during unforeseen events is an important part of business continuity. Keep an eye out for our next post where we’ll look at the how Citrix ADC can help you automate scaling of your applications, your delivery infrastructure and your licensing. We will also discuss the importance of monitoring and how Citrix ADM helps you understand demand and take action in real time.