As COVID-19 (coronavirus) continues to impact people and organizations around the world, the health and safety of our employees, customers, partners, and communities remain our top priority. We are working tirelessly to do everything we can to prepare our operations and our customers to maintain safe, secure, and uninterrupted operations throughout this global crisis.
A growing number of customers and organizations are turning to Citrix for advice and support to enable secure remote-work initiatives that can ensure the safety and productivity of their employees and to maintain ongoing business operations throughout this evolving global crisis. In the past few weeks, we have shared remote work best-practices and examples from customers around the globe using our virtualization and workspace solutions to ensure secure and reliable remote access to the applications and information needed to drive business continuity.
And a number of innovative organizations are leveraging them to operate their businesses as usual. We’ve been working with the University of Sydney, for example. With more than 14,000 students unable to travel to Australia from China due to imposed travel bans, we’ve been able to help connect their China-based staff and students and provide access to the applications and data they need to continue teaching and learning from the comfort and safety of their residences. And the City of Corona in California has implemented our workspace technology so that they can be agile and access their systems and data in emergency situations.
We will continue to provide resources, guidance, virtual seminars, and other valuable resources to help organizations shape their own remote work and crisis-response programs.
We are also taking additional actions to ensure the safety of Citrix employees and to make Citrix solutions available to organizations of all sizes striving to keep teams safe and productive in remote work situations:
Citrix Employee Travel Restrictions and Work-From-Home Advisories
- Global travel restrictions. Effective immediately, we are suspending non-business-critical travel to locations around the world. These new business-critical travel restrictions, which include travel within the U.S. and Europe, are added to our previous restrictions of any travel to Italy, Mainland China, and the Republic of Korea.
- Extended work-from-home policies. Effective immediately, we are encouraging those employees who have the ability to work-from-home to do so in Washington State, Oregon, and California through the end of March. This is in addition to previous work-from-home policies in China. Our Global Security Risk Services team is monitoring the situation daily, and we will adjust the scope of this guidance and consider expansions in other high-risk areas, as necessary.
- Voluntary work-from-home policies as required. In Hong Kong SAR, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Nanjing and Beijing in Mainland China, and Singapore, we have instituted a voluntary work-from-home policy. Our internal IT teams are prepared to expand work-from-home capabilities to employees in any area needed as the situation continues to evolve.
- Leveraging our technology in work-from-home scenarios. In high-risk areas like China, Republic of Korea and Japan, Citrix has leveraged our own virtualization and workspace solutions to rapidly mobilize our entire employee population — which includes engineering, customer support, sales, finance, marketing, and human resources — and transitioned them all to work from home within 24 hours. We are pleased to report that throughout this remote-work response, our employees in these areas have remained safe and connected, and their productivity and customer service levels remain unchanged.
- Restructuring of events. Out of an abundance of caution for the safety of our employees, customers and partners, we are, like many organizations, restructuring our scheduled events and doing what we do best: leveraging technology to connect people and information virtually from wherever they happen to be. Our Citrix Converge developer conferences set to take place in Prague and Bangalore at the end of the month, for instance, will now be held online. And our Customer Advisory Council and Executive Advisory Board meetings will be virtual, as well.
Related to our work-from-home policies in California and Washington State, with a reduced need for on-site support from certain Citrix hourly workers, we recognize the financial burden that creates. As such, we will continue to pay our hourly service employees during this period.
Extending Business Continuity Offers to Ensure Customer Safety and Success
Customers are asking us to help them make business continuity easy to do with options to expand user coverage rapidly. As such, we are launching new offerings that will allow our customers to speed the adoption of remote work and fuel business continuity even in the most tumultuous of times.
- Citrix Business Continuity Assurance Program
- Existing Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop (formerly known as XenApp and XenDesktop) customers will be extended special offers to quickly scale their current environment to a broader number of employees so they can be prepared to employ work-from-home and remote work programs as needed. For more information on the program, contact your Citrix account manager or click here.
- Citrix Managed Desktops Business Continuity Program
- For those organizations that lack the IT capacity or resources to deploy and manage virtual desktops on their own, we also will be providing special offers to Citrix Managed Desktops, our fully managed, turnkey Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering running on Microsoft Azure. Learn more about Citrix Managed Desktops here. For additional information on the program, contact your Citrix account manager or click here.
- Secure Citrix Workspace for Small Businesses
- Small businesses often lack the capacity and IT resources to establish business continuity programs and deploy remote work technologies. At Citrix, we believe every company should have equal ability to prepare for remote work and keep employees safe and productive — regardless of their size, budget, or resource constraints. That’s why we are announcing the availability of a new, low-cost entry-level version of our market-leading digital workspace solutions designed exclusively for small businesses. Citrix Workspace Essentials provides secure Single-Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor-Authentication (MFA) access to all SaaS applications and content in one unified experience. With the newest offering in the Citrix Workspace family, Citrix Workspace Essentials empowers small organizations to embrace remote work initiatives with the confidence that their applications and information will remain secure. For additional information on the program, click here or to contact your Citrix account manager click here.
At Citrix, we are committed to helping organizations of all sizes enable a flexible and dynamic workspace infrastructure that empowers employees to continue to work safely and remotely in a secure way and keep business moving forward.
Finally, Citrix will earmark a portion of its charitable contributions to go to support efforts and programs that are actively responding to the COVID-19 virus worldwide, with an emphasis on organizations that are providing support and services to impacted individuals and families.