Your financial organization works hard to stay competitive in a rapidly changing marketplace. This might include improving your customer service, integrating generative AI, or offering new products for customers. While you might invest in building some of your own new products, your organization may also have merged with or acquired other companies to realize value sooner. If your organization is making plans for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) this year, you’re not alone. According to EY, 90 percent of financial services CEOs plan to engage in M&A, and 72 percent plan to increase their investments in acquisitions.
For those organizations that have acquired businesses before, IT integration after the acquisition or merger often proves to be a headache. Not only does IT have to manage different data centers and navigate complex compliance rules, but some IT solutions aren’t compatible, adding further complexity. With Citrix, financial organizations can deliver compliance at scale, onboard new users quickly, and protect applications and data for newly acquired businesses and existing businesses.
Delivering compliance at scale
Compliance is complicated, and acquisitions and mergers can make meeting regulations even more difficult, especially if the organizations are located in different countries with different data sovereignty regulations. While IT systems for the organization need to be centralized post-merger or acquisition, sensitive data may have to stay on premises, but complex workloads have to be hosted in the cloud. According to Morgan Stanley cross border M&A is on the rise, so you need an IT solution that works globally.
With Citrix solutions, you can keep your data in any on-premises data center or private cloud and remain compliant with data privacy regulations. Citrix is compliant with GDPR, SOC 2, NIS2, DORA, and PCI 4.0 criteria, so your IT environment can remain compliant with even the most stringent regulations. Keeping data on premises doesn’t mean that you have to have all your resources on premises either. Citrix makes it easy to manage a hybrid or multi-cloud IT infrastructure. This means you can host your high CPU workloads, like 3D models, in the cloud so that you don’t have to maintain all the servers required for those workloads on premises.
Onboarding new users
Once you integrate the existing IT infrastructures of the companies your organization has acquired, you have to give all your employees secure access to the applications and desktops they need. Your enterprise might use single sign-on (SSO) vendor number 1, but the acquired organization might use SSO vendor number 2. Some of your users might also be third party contractors using personal devices. Creating an IT environment that can securely deliver applications and desktops, integrate different SSO and multi-factor authentication (MFA) vendors, and works for both corporate-managed and personal devices is hard.
Citrix solutions make it easy. Citrix can help you give new hires and new users from acquired companies fast and secure access to corporate resources, on any device. With support for a wide range of MFA and SSO vendors, you can integrate any security solution that your business needs.
If one of your businesses has managed devices and one has a bring your own device (BYOD) policy, Citrix solutions enable you to provide the same access to applications and desktops without waiting for corporate-managed devices for everyone. With our industry-leading HDX technology, you can deliver high-definition audio and video on any device, even over unstable network connections. You’ll also get day-one access to peripheral support, like Bloomberg peripherals, so employees can continue to work uninterrupted. This means faster onboarding, better user experiences for new employees and contractors, and faster time to value.
Protecting applications and data
Managing your hybrid resources and providing fast access to users doesn’t help if bad actors attack your organization. Implementing stringent security for your network, applications, and users will help you reduce the risk of a data breach. Protecting your applications and data from external threats includes centralizing applications and data and proactively monitoring your environment for potential security issues. Internally, you need to restrict users to only the applications and data they need for their tasks, to prevent malicious actors on the inside from accessing confidential data.
Citrix solutions include features to help you protect your IT environment internally and externally. By implementing centralized management, you don’t have to manually fix every endpoint if something goes wrong. You can simply resolve the issue in the data center or golden image, and then push that image live, a faster and simpler solution in the event of an outage. With Citrix uberAgent, you can utilize the threat detection engine to proactively monitor your environment for security concerns before they become a bigger issue.
To better protect your environment from employee mistakes and internal threats, Citrix Enterprise Browser and adaptive authentication provide a powerful solution. The Citrix Enterprise Browser allows you to assign the exact level of trust required for each user and device and make the user validate their identity through SSO or MFA before accessing resources. Plus, with remote browser isolation, you can completely isolate high-risk traffic from your corporate resources through a single-use browser session run on a public cloud. Lastly, with adaptive authentication, you can designate least privileged access for users, so that they only have access to the resources they need, providing an extra level of security for sensitive data and applications.
The industry-leading provider of VDI and DaaS
Citrix is the top choice for many financial institutions because our solutions deliver secure virtual resources to employees across your entire enterprise. You can meet your most stringent compliance needs while delivering high-definition user experiences to any device, anywhere. As M&A activity continues to expand, Citrix provides a flexible and secure IT solution that grows alongside your organization. Learn more about how Citrix can help your organization address common financial industry challenges in our financial use case guide.