Citrix Security Summit Highlights Zero-Trust

In October, I had the opportunity to attend the Citrix Security Summit. This security event was the last component of the three-part 2020 Citrix Summit Series, including the Cloud Summit and Workspace Summit. This final edition focused on the security challenges caused by people indefinitely working from just about everywhere. The expanding attack surface also demands a smart, agile, and flexible security approach from businesses. This summit showed how a valid zero-trust security framework keeps applications, data, and identities protected in the cloud, on-premises, and everywhere in between.

The global pandemic drove an exponential rise in remote workers. This health emergency also spurred an increase in vicious cyberattacks against company employees working from home. In general, enterprises had never anticipated the need to have a majority of their workers working remotely, so their cyber defense infrastructures were not in place. 

In his keynote address, David Henshall, Citrix President and CEO, talked about this new world of work. He also emphasized the need for organizations to rethink work models within a faster adoption of cloud computing and an accelerated digital transformation strategy. These new work models also emphasis the importance of retooling their approach to enterprise data security.

Citrix addressed their enterprise customers’ operational challenges through quick action with Google. The two companies implemented their shared vision of a “Zero-Trust Framework”  by combining forces to deliver the best cloud services platform to power virtual desktops and applications. The approach assumes that security perimeters or secure environments don’t exist. Together, they capitalized on over 250M enterprise deployed Chrome browsers to drive an agent-less experience for endpoint data security and user access. This unique approach enabled the “Just In Time” (JIT) deployment of security controls based on the access device, user environment, and operational context. The methodology safely democratizes remote access by simultaneously eliminating bespoke user and network security silos. Their “Zero Trust Framework” globally but invisibly implements intent-driven security and data access compliance by declaring requirements in advance and consistently enforcing policies.

Synopsys was one of the many Citrix customers that adopted a zero-trust approach. They saw data protection and access control as crucial elements of their remote worker support strategy. Citrix Workspace met this requirement by delivering secure, ubiquitous cloud access paired with a productive employee end-user experience.

Another convincing customer example was Kaizen Approach. They also boosted their cybersecurity through the adoption of zero-trust. Most of their customer base is in the government sector. However, their commercial business focuses on small and medium-sized companies that lack the resources required to support a full-time security architect or CISO. They needed a scalable and agile cloud-based approach for data security and secure remote access. Citrix Workplace and Secure Access addressed this requirement by providing access control and single sign-on to their critical SaaS-based management solutions. Citrix analytics for security was incredibly useful because it allowed them to establish security policies for each client independently and setup policy violation triggers in advance. This capability gave them the power of a proactive security posture instead of always being behind in a reactive security incident response mode.

If security is essential to your digital transformation or remote worker challenges, I strongly recommend visiting the Citrix Security Summit on-demand site. The site will help you learn more about the zero-trust framework and watch short, insightful video segments around important topics such as cybersecurity, secure application access, and data protection. It could also help if you also took some time to view my interview with Jeff Frick of theCUBE when I provided my overview of this very informative summit.

For more information on “Zero-Trust”, please visit:

•  How Zero Trust security improves the employee experience
• The surge in remote work brings zero-trust into focus

Article sponsored by Citrix