In the previous posts in our business continuity and Citrix ADC series, we discussed five objectives for business continuity and the importance of considering them all to ensure business success:
- Ensure workforce productivity, application availability, and end-user experience
- Scale IT infrastructure during unforeseen demand
- Respond faster to restore application performance
- Maintain visibility and control
- Remain secure and compliant always
So far, we’ve examined the first two objectives — maintaining application availability and scaling IT infrastructure. In this post, we will look at the importance of being able to respond fast to restore application performance and look at how the functionality in Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) can help.
Disruptions can take many forms, and businesses face different challenges to restore normality. For example, there might be a need to quickly provide remote workers with access to their familiar applications. Or an application or infrastructure issue might need to be identified and remediated rapidly. You may even have a requirement to swiftly shift critical IT workloads to other environments (on-prem, to the cloud, or among clouds). Whatever the challenge, Citrix ADC and Citrix ADM can help you address the situation and quickly restore your application performance.
Find Root Causes Faster With AI/ML
When something stops working, you need to find out why — and fast. Citrix ADM provides actionable analytics that help you get to the root of the problem to see what’s wrong. You can get application performance analytics for every application deployed behind your Citrix ADC. Citrix ADM helps you see application performance trends over time and take corrective actions if required. This is enhanced with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques that can diagnose problems automatically and suggest remediations. This self-healing capability helps you respond to unforeseen events quickly and enables you to get your systems back to normal much faster.
Be Agile with Operational Consistency
Citrix ADC has a single code base across all its form factors and across all its public cloud images. This brings operational consistency and means that your ADC configurations are easily portable. When you need to move workloads to a new environment, you can shift your applications and the associated application delivery infrastructure quickly.
By using the same types of ADCs across all your multi-cloud environments, you have fewer devices to learn and can be confident that your applications will be delivered equally well from wherever you need to deploy them.
Automate Deployment with Citrix ADM
Citrix ADM enables automation of your ADC configurations across your entire fleet of ADCs. During an unforeseen event you can make any necessary alterations to your ADC configurations and push them out en masse.
Citrix ADM also includes StyleBooks that enable you to shift workloads — and the associated ADC configurations — quickly among environments with just a few clicks. You can maintain the config rules and only need to change the environmental factors where they differ — IP addresses for example.
Flexible Pooled Licensing
Of course, when you shift workloads during an unforeseen event, you need to license your Citrix ADCs accordingly. With Citrix Pooled Capacity licensing you can move Citrix ADC capacity and functionality where you need it quickly to match the application’s requirements. Citrix ADM makes all your Citrix ADC licensing visible in a single location so that with just a few clicks you can control how and where you license your application delivery infrastructure to restore operations fast.
Quite literally, the speed with which a business responds to a situation will differentiate it from the competitors. The faster you respond, the faster you can recover and restore stability to your operations. This makes it possible to serve your customers faster and provides you with a competitive advantage.
In the next post we will take a closer look at how Citrix ADC and Citrix ADM provide you with the visibility you need to maintain control during unforeseen events. After all, you can’t fix what you can’t see.
