This is a guest blog post by Ginger Leishman, Technology Partnerships, at Duo Security.

Every organization today is transforming quickly to support a diversified workforce using a variety of devices to access their network resources, desktops and applications. As organizations are accelerating their digital transformation, you need to ensure employee access is verified, without compromising security or introducing unnecessary friction. To achieve this goal, you must be able to rapidly deploy and scale trust-based access that can sit in front of all your applications, cloud and on premises, ensuring only the right users, on verified devices, are accessing the applications they need to do their work.

Did you know the use of cloud applications is on pace to surpass on-premises applications by 2022?

Legacy Corporate Security Approaches

The classic approach to securing corporate information resources assumed several things:

  • One verification check at the point of initial access was sufficient, then access across the network was given.
  • Every endpoint being used to access resources was issued and managed by the organization.
  • All users, devices and applications were in fixed and known locations, usually on a corporate network behind a firewall.

The New Zero Trust Security Approach

Instead of the classic approach, organizations are now shifting to a zero trust approach. Zero trust shifts the secure perimeter to any place where you make an access control decision and prompts you to question your assumptions of trust every time there’s an access event. Never trust, always verify.

Citrix and Duo partnered together to bring zero trust access to all the applications in your network. Citrix provides organizations with a competitive edge by delivering everything employees need to be productive — apps, desktops, and content— in a unified experience.

Citrix Workspace customers can use Duo to leverage a wide range of advanced authentication uses cases to secure access to their Workspace deployments. Some of the state-of-the-art technologies that can be applied include risk-based multi-factor authentication, passwordless authentication, contextual policies, biometrics, and more.

Duo provides secure, trust based adaptive multi-factor authentication to ensure access is only given to trusted individuals and devices. Citrix Secure Workspace Access provides a zero trust approach to securely access corporate web, SaaS, and virtual applications. With advanced security controls for managed, unmanaged, and BYO devices, it’s ideal for IT and employees alike. Together, organizations of all sizes can achieve zero trust protection of their workforce.

Citrix Workspace and Duo’s Adaptive MFA Enforces Zero Trust

The joint Citrix Workspace and Duo Security solution makes it easy for an organization to deploy a seamless, yet robust, zero trust user experience to all users (employees, contractors, vendors, and others).

We are pleased to announce that Duo’s Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) has completed validation of the SAML 2.0 enhancement in Citrix Workspace, currently in public preview. This makes it easy for an organization to set up and deploy strong authentication and protect users and their access to their applications within Citrix Workspace.

Many Citrix Gateway customers use Duo for MFA to their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environments. They can use the same integration for Citrix Secure Workspace, and help migrate customers from on-prem Citrix Gateway to cloud delivered service. Duo Security is also part of the zero trust ecosystem in the Citrix Ready Workspace Security Program.

The Benefits of Duo’s Modern Access Security Solution

Below are images of the workflow of a user going to Citrix Workspace and then authenticating with Duo’s strong, adaptive MFA before they are logged in with access to the applications they need.

User goes to log in to Citrix Workspace
Redirected to Duo login portal through SAML integration. User enters their username and password.
Duo verifies the user’s identity with strong MFA
Once verified, the user is logged into Citrix Workspace!

Duo and Citrix customers can deploy a zero trust framework and enable their diversified workforce to securely access the resources they need, from any device, anywhere, anytime.

Learn more about Duo’s compatibility with Citrix. And, if you are interested in using Duo with Citrix Workspace we’d like to invite you to participate in our public preview. Just fill out this form.

For all the latest on Citrix and Cisco, check out this episode of Between the Clouds.