Citrix provides complete range of digital workspace solutions

Citrix offers Digital Workspaces that allow organizations to boost productivity, engage consumers, and empower their people. With a flexible and secure platform, organizations can connect, collaborate, and innovate anywhere—on any application, any device, any cloud, at any time. This is how the future works.

Ravindra Kelkar, Area VP, Indian Subcontinent, Citrix, presents his view. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How are you dealing with the Covid-19 situation? What plans have you put in place for your customers?

Ravindra Kelkar: Citrix has always believed in ‘Work is not a place to go to, but, what we do’. Many of our employees already had flexibility and choice of working from homewhen needed. The Covid-19 situation added the dimension of scale to it where almost the entire organization was forced to work from home not as a choice but as a compulsion.

Whilst Citrix started preparing to address the situation from early January 2020 and had required confidence – what was important to us is that our employees, partners, customers and communities feel supported as we all work through this global crisis. We are very proud of how we have maintained customer satisfaction, business SLAs and employee productivity and wellbeing.

We maintain detailed Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans to ensure business-critical functions and services are able to operate normally during critical times. Our Pandemic Response Plan specifically includes provisions for the safety of our employees, customers and suppliers, identification of business interdependencies and multiple recovery strategies such as remote working and workload transferring to geographically dispersed teams, among others.

That said, in order to help our customers keep their employees safe and operations running, we are also proactively reaching out to them to ensure their work from home readiness. Our help desk also remains available 24/7 for any such technical guidance.

DQ: How are you assessing on the learnings from enforced experiments around WFH?

Ravindra Kelkar: Since the global shift to a remote working model, work is becoming increasingly flexible and businesses too are forced to adapt. The essentials needed to see through this pandemic from a technology solutions standpoint already existed – but many organizations are now rapidly adopting those faster than ever before. Although the pandemic has proven to be an unwanted catalyst for accelerating digital transformation, to enable this type of agility, many businesses are now realising the need for having a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan.

Reliability, security and stability of cloud have now become important elements of the remote operating process. Most customers will now look beyond short term solutions like VPN which lack scale, introduce complexity, have security related issues and short term fix of sending office PCs home to comprehensive Workspace solutions that address productivity, choice of devices for employees and on other hand security, management and performance analytics needs for IT staff. The work-from-home model has led organisations to now revisit their remote working policies and redesignthem with a broader perspective.

DQ: How are you facilitating digital work for your customers?

Ravindra Kelkar: Most organizations that have been using Citrix technologies were already prepared for such an event. They scaled existing infrastructure to address the growing need for a larger number of employees operating remotely. Our digital workspaces have been instrumental in helping our customers ensure work as usual even during these times.

Through Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, SaaS apps and internal web apps via Citrix Access Control, our customers have always been mobile-ready. The built-in feature called Remote PC Access for Citrix customers with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Advanced/Premium allows any domain-joined internal PC to become securely accessible to remote employees without a VPN.

Multi-factor authentication to further protect from malware stealing passwords can also be enforced by IT. Our customers using Citrix Cloud furthermore have the advantage of managing and scaling the control plane with no infrastructure. That said our Remote PC Access works with on-prem or Citrix Cloud, making it even better for our customers.

DQ: How do you plan for a future of ‘digiwork’?

Ravindra Kelkar: Enabling employees to work from their homes using the applications and devices of their choice,while also maintaining the security of corporate systems and data, is no easy task. However, at Citrix, we’ve always been prepared for the future of work that is now digital. Leveraging our tools like digital workspaces, collaborative technologies and dynamic application control and delivery management has allowed our employees to connect and get work done from wherever they are in a secure and reliable manner.

Through our strategic and comprehensive business continuity measures, our focus is on activating untapped workforces and attracting the right talent across the globe in the long term. We will also continue to keep technologies like digital workspaces at the core of our business continuity plans, to help manage resources in a scalable and dynamic way that global business environments demand.

DQ: What are the solutions you are now offering for Future of Work / WFH?

Ravindra Kelkar: Citrix has always been prepared to help customers on their journey to future of work. WFH/remote work and giving employees choice for anytime, anywhere and any device access has been a component of that.

To unify everything that an employee or customer needs to be productive whilst working from home or remotely, Citrix provides a complete range of digital workspace solutions.We’ve kept the critical three Cs: connectivity, communication and collaboration, at the centre of all our offerings.

Citrix SD-WAN has been instrumental in helping our customers manage the quality of service and bandwidth burst in a dynamic way as they leverage both private and public cloud. They’ve also tapped our application delivery control (ADC) solutions to allocate resources to our applications. Citrix Analytics for Performance has helped our customersdetermine the root cause of performance issues across their remote working infrastructure.

With Citrix, organizations have been able to empower people to work in a flexible and secure yet in an intelligent way,enabling them to deliver better business results even during these times.

Ravindra Kelkar, Area VP, Indian Subcontinent, Citrix

Citrix Digital Workspaces are how organizations boost productivity, engage consumers, and empower their people. With a flexible and secure platform, organizations can connect, collaborate, and innovate anywhere—on any application, any device, any cloud, at any time. This is how the future works.