add3 Limited - Technology Driven Consultancy

Solution › Citrix

Anyone can install Citrix. Not everyone can make a Citrix environment secure, efficient and scalable.

Citrix is the cornerstone of add3s consultancy work and our consultants have vast experience. All of our consultants are Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrators (CCEA) accredited and have at least 5 years working with Citrix in a wide variety of large and small deployments in many industries. Using this knowledge we can apply ourselves to any Citrix project with the confidence that we will improve the users experience and get the most out of your investment.

All from a Citrix Platinum Partner background, our consultants have been involved with some of the largest and most complex deployments of global Citrix infrastructures for all types of applications and users. We can provide references for many of these on request.

For secure server based working add3 consider Citrix to be the choice for most businesses. The Citrix product is very mature and is used by the vast majority of large organisations as a strategic application deployment vehicle.

add3 will advise on the suitability of the Citrix suite of products in your environment and assist to plan and implement a secure, resilient and scalable solution according to guidelines and best practises developed from our years of experience.

The Citrix Access Suite at a glance;

Citrix Presentation Server

The foundation of the Citrix world and the technology which most organisations are interested in. Citrix Presentation Server is a bolt on to Microsoft Terminal Services which adds unrivalled management and control to your server based environment.

Brief highlights of the benefits include;

• Deliver your own applications quickly and efficiently to any user with any device.
• Centralise your applications making upgrades and service packs simpler.
• Consolidate your resources into a single, simple delivery process.
• Add excellent resilience to your applications using Citrix Load Balancing in your server farm.
• Provide excellent performance and security to remote users whatever their connection.
• Effectively and simply manage printers and other peripheral devices.
• Actively monitor your Citrix server resources and produce historical usage reports.
• Support applications in a Terminal Server environment which traditionally would not work.
• Smooth the performance of your server to enhance the users' experience.

Over 50 million people* use Citrix to access their business information, including virtually all of the FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies.

*Source - Citrix website August 2005

Citrix Password Manager

Password Manager is a one stop shop for all of your Windows, web and terminal based applications. Users authenticate with their primary account (Windows domain) and Password Manager takes care of the rest, all credentials are automatically submitted.

This means users do not have to remember perhaps dozens of passwords for individual applications and you do not need to worry about things like synchronising password expiration policies.

The whole process is very secure and all data is encrypted in storage and in transit.

You can now even let user change or un-lock their own primary (domain) password by answering a series of personal questions similar to the method used by internet or telephone banking. This will greatly reduce the number of calls to a support desk, most of which are generally password related.

Citrix Secure Gateway

Citrix Secure Gateway enables secure, encrypted access to corporate resources over the public internet so you can access your applications wherever you are in the world.

Essentially an add-in to Web Interface, Secure Gateway sits in your DMZ and acts as a broker between your Citrix applications and the outside world. It uses standard SSL certificates to ensure strong encryption for all data passed during the session. In its simplest form it can be a single server, but you can build in resilience if required.

Best of all its free.*

Also, see Citrix Access Gateway below to see the evolution of the Secure Gateway.

*Well, almost free. The software itself is free to Citrix customers, but you still have to provide hardware for it to run on and you have to have Citrix Presentation Server licenses.

Citrix Access Gateway

The Citrix Access Gateway is the next step for the Citrix Secure Gateway described above. Although they have similar names they are fundamentally different in that the Secure Gateway is software based the Citrix Access Gateway is a hardware appliance.

Designed to be placed in your DMZ, this 1U appliance allows secure access to all internal resources, not just Citrix servers. When used in conjunction with Advanced Access Control (the updated version of MetaFrame Secure Access Manager - MSAM) you can grant access to users based on checks on the device they are connecting from. This means that they can get limited access from a web cafe, slightly more access from a home PC and full access from a corporate device with up to date anti-virus and firewall.

Citrix GoTo Products

Citrix have a variety of products which allow you to connect and control to other devices securely across the internet. The pick of these is GoToAssist which allows you to remote control any PC (not just a Citrix session) across the internet securely, you could even display your screen to the user to illustrate an issue or provide training.

This is commonly used by technical helpdesks and saves a huge amount of time and confusion as the support analyst can see the issue first hand.

This is a fully hosted service and does not require any on-site infrastructure. Everything is 128bit encrypted and you have the option to record all actions in a remote control session as a video file for later review.

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