One of the new concepts announced at Citrix Summit 2017 was Secure Digital Perimeter. Technology has caught up and rather than being an aspirational concept, it is something that companies could and possibly should be adopting today.
What is 'Citrix Secure Digital Perimeter'?
The workspace is different today than it was a few years ago, and in some cases unrecognisable from its state 5, 10 or 15 years ago. Businesses have broadly adopted flexible working patterns – working from home or on the road.
You will struggle to find a business that hasn’t adopted 'The Cloud' in some way, shape or form, be it hosting your own services in IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), or through utilising SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions such as Office 365, Salesforce, Concur or Workday.
Alongside changes in the technology landscape, for the first time in history we have four generations of workers in the modern workforce. These all have different expectations from corporate technology - we have a demanding new generation with high expectations.
In today’s consumerised “surely there’s an App for that?!” world, there is the expectation that your workforce can be productive and engaged on any device, any time and anywhere. This is the traditional concept of 'any-ness' that Citrix have been market leaders in for many years, however the paradigm has changed.
The challenge is no longer how you can securely deliver access to corporate apps and data from your data centre. The apps and data aren’t necessarily in your data centre any more, they are as likely to be in a SaaS application, or cloud-hosted. The scope of the modern workspace has grown to include these external services, and yet the security controls are still designed to keep the data centre safe.
How do we secure the workspace now it’s grown outside of our walls?
We need to shift our mindset of where our perimeter is. It’s not the firewall, securing your networks from the internet, or the physical security in your data centre. The new perimeter is the user. 
By treating the user as the new security perimeter, this allows us to incorporate these new technologies and services into one unified workspace. User centric security allows us to deliver secure, unified, contextual access to corporate apps and data to any device, any time, anywhere, from your data centre, the cloud or even SaaS applications.
Where do we start?
We have created a new Secure Digital Workspace offering, which leverages the capabilities of the best of Citrix and Microsoft to deliver an integrated workspace solution.
This provides the security to address the challenges of today’s threats, whilst embracing new technologies and services to deliver flexibility and enable your workforce to become more productive.
For an introduction to Ultima’s Secure Digital Workspace, please contact us or look out for future blogs.
- By Andrew McCullough (Solutions Architect)
