As COVID-19 (coronavirus) continues to have an impact on people and organizations around the world, we know business continuity remains top of mind. Business disruptions can impact organizations of any size, in any location.

While this has been a hugely challenging time, many businesses have been successful in keeping their operations running during the current pandemic, but at a substantial financial cost and increased level of risk. Others have scaled back on travel but have broadly continued to operate their typical routine, with staff working from home.

Those in the latter group are using technology products such as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops that allow staff to work remotely without data ever being stored on the endpoint.

Over the past few months, the Citrix Customer Success Services team has been busier than ever working with customers to deploy remote working solutions to keep their businesses running. Recently, I have worked with two significant deployments, one for a customer in the education sector and the other in the public sector. We have been able to help both overcome technical challenges and ensure both were able to keep running.

Both had a common need that was very much front of mind — security. Both had to ensure that the solutions deployed were secure and had relevant controls in place to mitigate risks to a satisfactory level. However, one also had a significant focus on contextual access and a need to dynamically adjust which applications and data a user could work on, depending on where the end-user was and the type of authentication they had performed. Here, my team was able to engage with the customer’s security professionals and craft rules defining sufficient access to allow work to proceed but to limit the risk that confidential data was unduly exposed.

Zero trust security is the next hot topic for mobilizing a business. Many security professionals define the term slightly differently, and as time has gone on, defining what is meant by zero trust security has become easier due to greater consensus among professionals. For me, it’s merely to trust nothing, whether it is the device, the user, or the network. Then, depending on how the user and device present themselves to the system over an untrusted network, whether that be corporate or a WAN, application permissions can be varied and service offerings dynamically adjusted. However, moving businesses to this framework requires a shift in mindset. (Not to open up the can of worms, but where does the boundary of protection begin and end? Ideally, this is where the data is stored at rest upon the point it is accessed. But this is one for another day.)

The essential mindset shift is to define the assets and data, who needs to access it, when and from where, and to move away from a global one-size-fits-all provision of remote access. Such change requires close working relationships among security teams, data owners, business stakeholders, and, crucially, technical experts who can bring these plans to fruition.

The Citrix Customer Success Services team is holding a webinar to help answer critical questions and to highlight where Citrix remote access solutions can enhance your delivery. As part of this webinar, we will show you how to provide:

  • A better experience to end users
  • An improved security posture following the move to a remote business
  • An understanding of what’s next, now that you’ve deployed a short-term offering

Join us at 11 a.m. CET on Wednesday, June 3, for the webinar, where the Citrix Customer Success will discuss the key challenges, lessons learned, and potential key wins that will help highlight the next steps in securing and stabilizing remote working solutions successfully. Register today!

Plan Your Approach to Business Continuity
Date: Wednesday, June 3
Time: 11 a.m. CET
Register now!