One of the more important product announcements this week at Synergy was that the Secure Browser Essentials will be available later this year on the Azure Marketplace. I have been interested in secure browsing technology for several years now, mainly because the web browser has been a major infection vector for years, allowing malware to be transported to millions of computers through phishing, man-in-the-middle, SQL injection and countless other attacks. Securing the browsing channel could be a way to stop this madness.
A few years ago, I did a review of several products for Network World, looking at Authentic8 Silo, Spoon’s BrowerStudio, Invincea’s FreeSpace and Spikes AirGap. While the review is outdated, the process that I went through to try to test these products made me realize that securing everyone’s web browsers is a lot harder problem that it first appears. The secure browser might give up surfing speed or not view a more complex website properly. And you still have someone’s regular browser sitting on their PC that could cause trouble. Not to mention that some of these early products did a lousy job at protection.
Citrix has had a secure browser service as part of its Cloud offerings for about a year now. While the motivation behind its old and new products is similar, the execution is different, as Brett Waldman in their product marketing department explained to me. The older secure browser, which you could see demonstrated at one of the kiosks in the Citrix booth on the show floor, allows you to secure a specific web app. You set up an instance that ties a specific browser version (such as Chrome or Edge) to a specific app (such as Facebook), and you can add a data center that the browser request will originate from. Once this is done, every time you launch that instance, you will bring up an HTML v5 copy of a browser and taken to Facebook’s website under just those circumstances. The actual browsing is happening inside Citrix Cloud, not on your local PC. It is a way to lock things down with a specific app. You can think of it as running a stripped-down version of Receiver just for this one app.
But that isn’t good enough and doesn’t handle a lot of situations. What happens if you want more control over your browsing experience that goes beyond specifying a browser type and originating location? Or if you want to run a machine that isolates the browser from the rest of the applications? Or just want to try out a secure browser without loading a lot of Citrix infrastructure? That is where the app layering technology that Unidesk provides comes in handy, and that was what announced this week with Secure Browsing Essentials. By having layering, you can select exactly which bits and pieces of the browser you want to enable, so if you don’t want Flash or want to block pop-ups or downloads of executable files, you don’t assemble those pieces of code.
This product will be sold on the Azure Marketplace, just as other “Essentials” products are currently being sold. PJ Hough, Citrix SVP of Product, said the new Citrix Secure Browser Essentials will arrive by year’s end in the Azure Marketplace, with pricing starting at $180 per year (with a three-year subscription for a minimum of 50 subscribed users). Waldman said that this product “gives us a different route to market and to be able to satisfy these other use cases. Because it is on the Marketplace, it can also be more self service and reach a different kind buyer, even within an existing Citrix customer.” Look for it in the late fall.
