This is a guest blog post from Akamai.

Guardicore, now known as Guardicore Akamai Segmentation, joins the Citrix Partner Pavilion at HIMSS this year with a slightly different look. Now part of Akamai, the organization committed to protecting and powering life online, Guardicore remains focused on providing a microsegmentation solution as part of a broader zero trust offering.

Akamai’s existing zero trust solutions include SWG, ZTNA, MFA, and more. With Guardicore now part of the zero trust portfolio, we are uniquely positioned to provide a complete zero trust offering to secure enterprises and their dynamic environments against the next generation of cyber threats.

Citrix VDI offers an agile IT infrastructure model for healthcare organizations that allows doctors and nurses quick and easy access to their applications and data as they move throughout their facility and work with various patients.

This is made possible by centralizing the data and apps in a shared server or group of servers with shared storage and compute capacity, and offers profound productivity gains and employee enablement.

However, the ability to granularly manage user access to the datacenter and various applications is traded off for the productivity and simplicity that users enjoy with VDI. This type of access management is essential for a secure environment and is actually required by many compliance bodies, especially in healthcare.

Consider this simple example of how this might produce vulnerabilities: If a single set of user credentials is stolen, and that user already had an all-access pass to any application or data in the environment, that opens the door for an attacker to see and extract any type of patient data they want.

This is where Guardicore Centra can help. Let’s say you have multiple users logging into the same server. If multiple users have access to the same applications, even ones they don’t need, your attack surface is far larger than it needs to be, and the door is open for attackers to move laterally if they obtain stolen credentials. Using Guardicore Centra, you can ensure that users running Citrix VDI only have access to the applications and data they really need, helping you eliminate unnecessary connection paths that create vulnerabilities.

The ability of Centra to provide visibility beyond VDI, including into on-premises infrastructure, VMs, containers, or datacenters in the cloud, allows security administrators to see all these devices or assets from a single UI. They can then set security policies that cover all these assets, significantly lowering the chance that an attacker moves laterally from the VDI environment to a separate datacenter, for example.

To summarize the benefits of securing your VDI environment with Guardicore:

  • Holistic security and control across all Citrix environments with VDI and beyond, including on-prem deployments, cloud, and containers.
  • Restricted lateral movement by limiting the attackers’ movement across the environment. This is done using comprehensive microsegmentation and breach detection capabilities using up-to-date threat analysis fed from Guardicore Labs.
  • Accelerated compliance by having a strengthened understanding of the data flows within their environment and by checking required segmentation and user access management checkboxes that are required by many compliance bodies.
  • Zero trust access management, ensuring users are only able to access what they need to.

Join us at the Citrix Ready Partner Pavilion at HIMSS22, and view our virtual session here. To learn more about Guardicore, please visit https://www.guardicore.com/.