When the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic hit, business continuity was top of mind for everyone. Even if you had a business continuity plan and extensive remote work capabilities, few would have imagined such a prolonged absence from traditional offices. Some companies had their workforce up and running remotely in a short period of time, while others are still building the infrastructure to support remote work.

Though lockdowns are being relaxed in several parts of the world, many organizations are evaluating their strategies and IT infrastructure to enable remote work in the long term, not just temporarily. At Citrix, we’ve been a leader in providing technologies that can enable your workforce with a robust remote work IT environment, and we have a variety of resources to address challenges organizations are facing today.

Here’s a look at a few key components of a remote work IT infrastructure and how Citrix Ready partners can help to create an integrated ecosystem of technologies:

Endpoints

The first touchpoint for your workforce when they start their day (provided they’ve already had their coffee) is an endpoint device. The appropriate device/OS becomes imperative with your employees are working from home. Centrally securing and managing multiple devices becomes a breeze with the right solutions. Our partners IGEL, Stratodesk, HP, and others provide reliable, trusted, and Citrix Ready-verified devices and operating systems for a seamless connection to your Citrix environment. Learn how to choose the right endpoint, for the right use case.

Cloud

The second component in your IT infrastructure is the source from which these endpoint devices are pulling data and applications. If you’re familiar with Citrix, you know we value choice and flexibility. This could be an on-prem data center or via cloud solutions — public, private, or hybrid. It can be hard to maintain a data center without an IT team onsite, especially if enterprises haven’t upgraded their IT infrastructure to cloud.

At Citrix, we offer an entire infrastructure suite on Citrix Cloud, designed using industry best practices to achieve a high degree of service availability. We offer the best-in-class integration, collaboration, and support with public cloud vendors such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. To support your specific use-cases, there is a set of Citrix-compatible technologies that can help simplify the setup and provide a hassle-free employee experience for your workforce. These technologies vary from vGPUs to the partitioning of GPUs and managing multi-cloud digital workspaces and more. Take a look at featured partner integrations available on hybrid multi-cloud.

Security

With an increasing number of attacks — phishing, malware, and conference call hacking, for example — and an expanding remote workforce, security is probably top of mind for many of you. A zero trust approach requires that enterprises not trust any entity (user, device, apps, APIs) inside or outside the perimeter of the network at any time. It enables a way to continuously assess and authorize every user and every device looking to access any protected resource. Our Citrix Ready partners offer a wide range of security solutions to address growing cybersecurity threats. Partners such as Okta, Bitdefender, Yubico, Guardicore, and others have developed technology that can help supercharge your end to end IT security. Check out what’s possible with the seamless combination of Citrix and our security partners.

Monitoring

Another important component is the ability to monitor your infrastructure for a variety of devices, locations, users, applications, and IT setups. It becomes a real challenge for the IT team to ensure all resources in the data center are up and running and available to users. It’s imperative to proactively monitor the user experience, as well as resources such as servers, network devices, and bandwidth consumption. We have verified partner technologies that help to pinpoint issues and troubleshoot them. Check out Citrix Ready partners such as ControlUp, eG innovations, Goliath, Liquidware, and others in the Citrix Ready Marketplace.

Unified Communication

One of the most common challenges of working remotely is our inability to meet colleagues face to face. There are many collaboration tools available in the market, but not all meet the right protocols or live up to the standards companies need. We’ve worked with key partner technologies, conducting rigorous testing and verification, to provide seamless integration in a Citrix environment. These partners not only provide feature-rich applications, but also complete unified communication tools that are secure. Check out tools such as optimized Zoom meetings with Citrix, Star2Star Communication’s Application Framework, RingCentral, Cisco Jabber Softphone for VDI, and BlueJeans meetings.

And, to tie it all together, let’s look at a special solution that can help boost your IT performance. Our partner Connectify has created a channel bonding technology that enables you to use multiple internet connections simultaneously for their combined speed. Check out how you can accelerate everything, including uploads, downloads, web browsing, and streaming video, with their Speedify solution.

Though remote work has always been at the core of our business at Citrix and we’re used to working with flexible schedules and multiple devices, our current situation of 100 percent remote work is new even to us. Our partners have helped to ensure business continuity for us but for our customers. We are on a mission to help organizations keep their employees safe and healthy and their businesses running.

You can find more resources that will help you to succeed in these difficult times at our Remote Works series. And check out the Citrix Ready Marketplace for a range of Citrix-compatible solutions and learn how they can help you!