NetScaler: Making the Mobile Enterprise Happen

You’re a customer rep about to go on a sales call in a country where hacking is considered a sport. You need all the latest information on the prospect you’re about to visit. To get it, the application on your iPad needs to access the data on several servers in your company’s home data center. It’s one of those moments when the rubber meets the road. If the app is slow and you can’t get the data, your presentation will fall flat and you won’t get the deal. And if the data transmission is insecure, critical customer information and intellectual property could fall into the wrong hands.

Fortunately, everything works perfectly. Thanks to NetScaler. You haven’t heard of NetScaler? Citrix NetScaler is an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) that works hand-in-hand with Citrix XenMobile, ShareFile, XenDesktop and XenApp. As an ADC, it sits between the firewall and one or more application servers to ensure users get to applications based on their needs, while helping to protect the data.

In a mobile enterprise, the network, no less than the mobile workspace, plays a critical role. And when it comes to the network, bandwidth is just the starting point.  Technologies like ADCs are essential in enabling that bandwidth to carry applications and data to the users who need them. 

Some history: ADCs are descended from load balancers, which distribute workloads across Web servers for the best resource utilization and response time. As Web servers delivered applications rather than static content, the role of the load balancer evolved into that of the ADC, although today’s ADCs still perform load balancing.

NetScaler has more features than can be listed here, but here are some highlights:

• Availability: Performs load balancing between servers and server health monitoring.  If a standby server is needed, it can be brought online.
• Performance: Performs several kinds of caching and compression; processes SSL requests, relieving server workload; consolidates HTTP requests to a single TCP socket; manages traffic to blunt DDoS attacks, making sure traffic gets to critical applications.

• Security: Enables single sign-on (SSO), strong multi-factor authentication, encryption and micro-app VPN functionality; automates network security, freeing the device owner from security tasks. These features play an essential role in compliance, because they assure that all required authentication, encryption, logging and networking security measures are enforced.

Features like these have earned NetScaler a spot in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant – and a partnership with Cisco, which promotes NetScaler through its sales channel.

But the important thing to remember is that NetScaler makes applications available, reliable and secure. When you’re out on the road, you want things to “just work.” Thanks to NetScaler, they just do.