Every employee in your hybrid workforce is unique. They have their own devices and home networks, their own remote work preferences, and their own workflows in how they get their best work done. However, all hybrid employees need reliable and secure access to essential business apps and data from wherever they work — and while every employee wants this access process to be simple, each employee also has different access needs, capabilities, and endpoints.
Because IT security policies are not “one size fits all,” Citrix Secure Private Access offers adaptive access and authentication for hybrid employees. Adaptive policies enable your organization to determine the appropriate levels of access for all employees, then automatically enforce these IT security policies without disrupting the hybrid work experience.
How Adaptive Authentication Works to Improve Access Security
Whenever a hybrid employee accesses one of your company’s SaaS, cloud, or private web apps, they use an endpoint like their work laptop or personal smartphone. An end user might not see the difference between a managed endpoint like the work laptop and an unmanaged endpoint like the smartphone. However, IT experts know these endpoints have vast security differences and require different IT security policies.
The adaptive authentication in Citrix Secure Private Access enables you to adjust authentication requirements based on the context of how a user is logging in. For example, a hybrid employee using a work laptop on their usual home office network could have a simpler authentication process than an employee using an unmanaged device to log in from an unknown location. In the second case, adaptive authentication could automatically require additional security challenges like two-factor authentication.
The flexible nature of adaptive authentication makes it essential for today’s interconnected world. It’s not just remote workers who want to log in to your SaaS apps — vendors, partners, and newly acquired companies might need access to certain apps and data. Adaptive authentication can simplify this access by using an email address to determine a user’s access privileges and modifying the authentication process to fit. This supports a wide variety of business scenarios with a logical authentication flow in a single solution.
Why Adaptive Access is Important for Security
Because individual users may use a variety of endpoints to access sensitive data and business apps, your IT security policies need to recognize how dynamic the user landscape can be. Simply because someone is trustworthy and careful at one point in time does not guarantee they will always behave that way. This makes it important for your access security to be agile enough to recognize when users are acting oddly and alter their access before a breach occurs.
That’s why Citrix Secure Private Access offers adaptive access, which enables you to dynamically adjust security policy as a user’s risk level changes. For example, if a user logged on from a new location after several failed authentication attempts, Citrix Secure Private Access would be alerted about the user’s abnormal behavior. If the user then tried to download a lot of files or access apps outside of their normal work patterns, adaptive access would automatically stop that user’s access and notify IT.
Adaptive access also helps prevent user errors from turning into breaches. We’ve all had the experience of sharing our screen during a meeting only to find we accidentally shared information that wasn’t meant to be displayed. This information may have been as harmless as a household grocery order, but it also could have been sensitive data like salary information or company finances. Citrix Secure Private Access helps prevent these mistakes with screen sharing protection policies that prevent accidental broadcasting of sensitive information when using video conferencing apps.
Enable Flexible Access Security with Citrix Secure Private Access
Your IT security policies can never be one-size-fits-all, but adaptive authentication and adaptive access enable you to simplify the user login process without hindering security. With Citrix Secure Private Access, you can easily determine and enforce the right user privileges for the right users — no matter where or when they work.
To learn more about how Citrix Secure Private Access strengthens security, watch these videos.
