Today, Citrix is excited to announce the introduction of Citrix App Delivery and Security Service.

The industry’s first intent-based, continuously optimizing, self-healing, internet-aware application delivery service radically simplifies the secure delivery of applications for today and the next decade.

Two key trends are forcing businesses to fundamentally re-examine their approach to application delivery and security:

  • Application experience is the new currency of business
  • The hyper-transition to cloud and SaaS is here

These trends present challenges for IT. For one, the distributed nature of apps and users has increased complexity, and current levels of automation are insufficient, putting IT in a perpetual catchup mode. Second, just as cyberthreats are proliferating, security solutions are becoming more fragmented, creating gaps in security posture and leading to exposure. And the internet — something IT has no visibility into or control over — is displacing the corporate WAN for app delivery.

These challenges hamper IT and make it difficult to deliver business outcomes effectively. IT must transition from being in constant catchup mode to walking in lockstep with the business to achieve agility.

Introducing Citrix App Delivery and Security Service

Citrix has been a pioneer in application delivery and security solutions, driving innovation for more than 20 years. Now Citrix is disrupting yet again. The new Citrix App Delivery and Security Service represents a paradigm shift in application delivery designed to ensure an optimal experience for application end users.

Citrix App Delivery and Security Service is modeled on four basic human principles that have shaped human progress in the modern era: intent based, always learning, always adapting, and always protecting. These characteristics radically simplify app delivery deployment as companies shift their workloads to — and deliver applications from — the cloud.

Intent-Based: Unmatched Automation

Application deployment and delivery can be complex in the cloud era, and, with so much at stake in terms of application experience, it needs to be made simpler and less prone to error. Citrix has designed its new service to be intent-based with unmatched automation so that business can deploy applications more quickly.

When you intend to take a vacation and use the services of a travel agent, you tell the agent where you want to go and when, and the agent plans the itinerary, books plane tickets, and reserves accommodations. Similarly, Citrix App Delivery and Security Service enables you to define your business intent, translates that to the right policies, and then automatically orchestrates and configures resources appropriately to achieve it.

A typical deployment of application delivery infrastructure involves many manual steps that can be complex, error-prone, and based on guesses. You must select the right cloud compute instance, choose the right ADC instance type and license it, configure the ADC with the right application server parameters, publish the application to DNS, and set the right autoscale thresholds. And, when your business goals change, you need to go through the entire process … again and again.

Citrix App Delivery and Security Service removes the complexity from every step of the application delivery lifecycle. You simply define the intent and let the service take care of all the tedious, repetitive orchestration and configuration steps for you. The unmatched levels of automation increase operational efficiencies up to 60 percent for IT. After all, IT should be focused on the business goals and not the syntax of the configuration.

Always Learning: End-to-End Visibility

Beyond the initial setup of your application delivery infrastructure, your intent needs to be enforced continuously as conditions change. Outages or degradation can occur anywhere between users and applications, which can dramatically alter the application and user experience.

Just as humans are always learning about the changes that occur in their environments, Citrix App Delivery and Security Service is always learning about the end-to-end app-to-user delivery environment. It collates telemetry about the health and performance of the servers, the applications, and the ADC status across all your environments, as well as continuously learns about the ever-changing security threat landscape.

Additionally, Citrix App Delivery and Security Service is the only service to offer comprehensive and actionable visibility into the state of the internet, which eliminates the blind spot for application delivery. Powered by Citrix Intelligent Traffic Management (ITM) technology, the service collects up to 10 billion data points per day from 1 billion users across 50,000 networks worldwide. This data includes internet latency, throughput, and availability, which the service uses to construct a virtual map of application experience for end users to provide an optimal application experience.

Always Adapting: Continuous Optimization and Self-Healing

Just as humans adapt to their surroundings to survive and prosper, Citrix App Delivery and Security Service uses the information it learns to continuously optimize application delivery when things change and tries to self-heal when things go wrong.

When an application server fails or slows or an app malfunctions, the service detects this and automatically removes it from the load balancing pool so user experience is not impacted. When demand increases such that the ADC resources are close to exhaustion, the Citrix service automatically adds and configures additional ADC instances to handle the load and remove them when demand returns to normal.

Actionable Internet Awareness to Plan, Deploy, and Optimize App Delivery

Citrix App Delivery and Security Service also uses its insight into the state of the internet to help you plan, deliver, and optimize app delivery.

  • Remove the guesswork associated with where you host your apps — By simulating deployment scenarios, you can work with data — not intuition — to understand the expected application response times to ensure the best application experience for your investment, all before you spend anything
  • Deliver the fastest app response — Citrix offers the world’s first global server load balancing (GSLB) solution with internet-state awareness. Other solutions use primitive rules like failover, round robin, or geo-proximity. Only Citrix can guide requests to the best available PoP based on prevailing internet conditions for each individual user to deliver the best application experience.
  • Optimize delivery — Only Citrix takes a proactive approach to application delivery optimization. Citrix App Delivery and Security Service analyzes your user data and makes recommendations for new, more optimal PoP locations to help you meet SLAs for application response when your traffic patterns or user geographies change.

Always Protecting: Securing Your Apps and APIs

Just as humans protect things that are important to them, Citrix App Delivery and Security Service protects the apps and APIs that are valuable to your business. The new Citrix service offers holistic protection including WAF, bot management, and API security to protect your valuable applications from cyberthreats and keep your business running. Moreover, the consolidated approach to security and single-pass architecture ensures higher application performance and lower latency.

With intent-based configuration, gone are the days of time-consuming, error-prone security policy definition and configuration. Citrix App Delivery and Security Service lets you define your security intent with a single click. For example, if you want to ensure the strongest SSL encryption, with just one click all your SSL interactions will be set up to achieve Qualys SSL Labs A+ certification.

As a cloud-delivered service, there is no operational overhead associated with installation and maintenance. The service automatically scales to meet your security demands as they change. And because Citrix takes care of updates, all the latest security protections are immediately available to prevent valuable data from being exposed and to protect your business from financial and legal liability.

A Game Changer That Frees IT to Focus on Strategic Business Initiatives

Citrix App Delivery and Security Service radically simplifies application delivery and security, speeding application deployment and all but eliminating configuration errors. It enhances operational efficiency up to 60 percent, unshackling IT departments from mundane tasks so they can focus on more strategic business initiatives. This new service is a game changer and delivers a much-needed remedy for the complexity of modern application delivery and security.

Citrix App Delivery and Security Service is available for preview for AWS workloads, with Azure support coming soon, and it will be generally available in January 2022. Learn more about Citrix App Delivery and Security Service.

For Citrix Investors

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