Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure

Whether large ERP solutions or custom web apps, email or e-commerce, client-server applications or SOA, your success in IT today depends on ensuring that your applications help meet your business goals. If the infrastructure you rely on to deliver business applications to end-users wasn’t designed with modern application realities in mind, you end up massively over-provisioning, buying too much bandwidth, adding too many servers, and refreshing PCs on an increasingly short lifecycle just to keep up with growing application requirements.

Citrix believes that businesses can avoid these costs and enhance IT agility with an end-to-end application delivery strategy:

• a strategy that includes infrastructure solutions deployed along the line-of-sight between data centers
  and end-users
• a strategy that makes it easy to deliver any application to any user with the best performance, highest security, and lowest cost
• a strategy featuring products that work great with your existing infrastructure, and even better when deployed together

Starting from the data center and working out toward the end-user, there are four critical best practice objectives to keep in mind.

Control Applications at their Source

An end-to-end application delivery strategy starts with infrastructure products that are deployed in the data center, directly in front of applications – controlling the initial delivery of applications as close as possible to their source. Web applications are extremely verbose and carry far richer content than client-server applications, creating massive increases in application traffic. They are much easier to exploit, opening new data security risks. The combination of these factors dramatically slows application performance, driving up the cost of servers and bandwidth, and increasing data security risks. To address the challenges of Web application delivery, companies need to look to integrated application networking products, such as the Citrix NetScaler product line, which goes beyond traditional load balancing; optimizing application traffic over the network by incorporating advanced technologies like compression, caching, and security.

With Windows applications, the issues are much different. The traditional approach is to install each application on every end user’s PC, then attempt to manage, upgrade, patch, and maintain them at the endpoints. This model quickly creates huge problems with cost and complexity that grow exponentially as applications and users are added or changed in any way. The Citrix Presentation Server product line offers a far better solution, by installing applications one time in the data center and virtualizing or streaming their delivery over the network. This approach dramatically improves the cost, simplicity, and security of managing Windows applications without compromising the end-user experience in any way.

A well-designed application delivery strategy should also incorporate Windows desktops, as they represent the primary operating environment through which employees access their applications. Major technical advances in recent years have made it possible for the first time to deliver highly dynamic virtual desktops over the network to office workers with zero compromise in end-user experience. This model can dramatically improve the economics, simplicity, and security of traditional desktop management. The Citrix Desktop Server is one example of a solution designed to address this challenge.

Secure Access to Applications

A second key consideration in a successful application delivery strategy is making it easy for users to securely access their applications from any location. Citrix Access Gateway is a next generation SSL VPN that is much easier to install and is specifically designed to provide application-layer access to the exact application resources each user needs. It goes beyond simple network access, with SmartAccess, a unique capability that gives IT control over which actions a user can perform within each application based on his or her unique access scenario. A user accessing a corporate application from an office computer, for example, might be able to use all application functions, while that same user connecting from an untrusted external location might be able to view application data, but not save or print.

Optimize Applications over the Wide Area Network

A second key consideration in a successful application delivery strategy is making it easy for users to securely access their applications from any location. Citrix Access Gateway is a next generation SSL VPN that is much easier to install and is As a result of trends like user mobility, globalization, and outsourcing, more than half of all employees at mid to large sized enterprises now access their applications from branch offices. Traditional networks were never designed to deliver the kind of application traffic they are expected to handle today, especially as companies consolidate data centers and start pushing applications like voice and video over the network. Citrix WANScaler is a WAN optimization product specifically designed to address this problem by automatically optimizing all application traffic over the wide area network, an approach that can dramatically improve application performance and reduce bandwidth requirements by as much as 75 percent. designed to provide application-layer access to the exact application resources each user needs. It goes beyond simple network access, with SmartAccess, a unique capability that gives IT control over which actions a user can perform within each application based on his or her unique access scenario. A user accessing a corporate application from an office computer, for example, might be able to use all application functions, while that same user connecting from an untrusted external location might be able to view application data, but not save or print.

Monitor the End-User Experience

The success of any application delivery strategy rests on the ability of IT to truly monitor the experience of end users, especially with regards to application performance. Citrix EdgeSight gives IT visibility into exactly what the application experience feels like for end-users making it much easier to maintain service level agreements with business stakeholders, spot bottlenecks before they become issues, and quickly diagnose problems when they do occur.

Unlike a few short years ago, businesses today run on applications. In an increasingly volatile world where you face a dizzying array of changes to applications, users, and business climates, making application delivery a strategic imperative is no longer an option. Contact Citrix to learn more about application delivery infrastructure and how these four best practice objectives can help your business.