Work From Anywhere: Kevin L. Jackson Talks With Matthew Crawford Of Citrix

Kevin L Jackson discusses work from home and zero-trust security with Matthew Crawford, director of product marketing at Citrix. This discussion was a Facebook live-stream on November 11, 2020, from the Citrix Airstream in Bull Run Regional Park in Centreville, VA.

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

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

Kevin L. Jackson (00:00):

So, hi Matt. Hello everyone. It's Kevin Jackson. I'm here in the Airstream, as I said. It's raining this morning, but I got an opportunity to work from anywhere, so I'm doing an interview this morning with Matt Crawford. Matt Crawford, who is a director of product marketing at Citrix. Good morning, Matt. And you're from Fort Lauderdale?

Matthew Crawford (00:26):

Good morning, Kevin. Yep. Fort Lauderdale. Happy to be here. I wish I could say we were dry down here, but we were pretty wet as well, but I'm really happy to join you today and excited to talk about Citrix workspace.

Kevin L. Jackson (00:40):

Great. Well, thank you very much. I caught the big purple machine here yesterday, and then sort of enjoying my time here. It got kind of quiet and dark last night. I'm in the middle of the woods here. So, are you responsible for the marketing across all of Citrix, or what specific areas?

Matthew Crawford (01:06):

I'm based here in Fort Lauderdale at our headquarters, and I work in product marketing for Citrix workspace, which is a pretty big part of the portfolio. Basically, providing this digital work experience for employees. And so, it encompasses several different technologies, and I'm sure we'll get into that as the conversation unfolds. But it's exciting for me, it's exciting times, really, because of all the things that are happening in terms of people really rethinking how work gets done, and being kind of in the center of that with Citrix. So it's an exciting place to be.

Kevin L. Jackson (01:40):

This is something. Things have really changed dramatically. Last year, I'll be talking to people about digital transformation and the need to be able to work from anywhere and putting all your business processes on the cloud and digitalization and all of that. And people say, yeah, yeah, we need to do that in about four or five years. And then all of a sudden, boom, it's like an immediate requirement. And all those projects that people had on the shelf, they were going to do in two or three or four years or didn't have funding, all of a sudden had funding. And this became a real thing. How did that affect you? You probably didn't expect to have such a huge requirement, globally, for your product. I mean, they were ready. They wanted to shop, ready to go, it seems.

Matthew Crawford (02:38):

Right. Well, it's interesting when you say personally, how did it affect me? So I'm been marketing, right? And so, you start off 2020 with a marketing plan and lots of things that you think you're going to do, and then early in the year, we kind of ripped that up. On the flip side of the equation, you're right when you say that our products were actually positioned well, and the functionality of our products still are in high demand. And so, when I say rip up our marketing plan, it wasn't so much that we had to kind of invent something from scratch. It was more that we had to focus on one specific component of it, really almost to the exclusion of all others for a short time, because that was so critical for people. Being able to quickly enable remote work, and make sure people are aware of the functionality, the capabilities. Again, speaking from a marketing person perspective, we had to pivot and enable our sales team to do that in response to what customers need.

Matthew Crawford (03:31):

So, we were able to marshal the forces. And then the other aspect, you wanted to mention how it affected me personally as a stitch, right? We always have a mantra of being able to work from anywhere and we put it to the test, right? I was definitely one of those people that was in the office most days, and then was remote, obviously, a hundred percent, and you know what, it worked out fine. I've got myself set up. You can see my little home office here that, I basically haven't been in the office in, I don't know how many months now. Eight months. And so, just like everybody else, we at Citrix are experiencing the same kind of remote work phenomenon. Fortunately, we have our products to rely on. So it's been a relatively smooth transition from that point.

Kevin L. Jackson (04:20):

Well, one thing, being in marketing, I can imagine you're sitting around a table saying, "Okay, this is supposed to improve organizations, improve the employee experience." And you're sort of saying, "Well, we hope this works." You have any stories about... Because many organizations, they were afraid to do this remote work. Managers like to see butts in seats, people in the office. And if you're in the office, then you must be producing. And now, no one's in the office. And these managers need to know, I guess maybe they're biting their nails and pulling out their hair saying, "I don't see anybody. Is anybody really working?" So is it improving the employer experience, all the employees home partying?

Matthew Crawford (05:24):

Yeah. Well, it's a complex question, actually. Because when you say productivity, I think you're right. Initially, people thought, okay, man, we're sending everybody home. They're not going to be as productive as they were before. And actually, it's the opposite, right? In most cases, people are actually much more productive, in many cases, when they're working remotely. And so, it's kind of shifted from, "Oh, can they do this?" to "Wait a minute, they're doing this a little too much there." You know, the boundaries between work and home are blurring. People are working longer hours. And actually, there's this genuine concern about well being and burning out, frankly, for some employees, right?

Kevin L. Jackson (06:06):

Right.

Matthew Crawford (06:06):

Because now you've eliminated the commute, which can be good, but at the same time, if you overdo it, you can, like I said, burn yourself out. The other piece to that equation though, is that yes, for a lot of companies they found that work that they thought was best done in the office is actually perfectly fine and even done better, remotely. Right? And more people are happier. They're more productive. But we have to acknowledge that, in some cases, first of all, some people never went home to work. Right? Some people are, whether they're essential workers or frontline type of workers who are... I was meeting with an oil and gas company just yesterday, as a matter of fact, and they were talking about how, "You know what?" Our, field workers, the people out in the field, there's no concept of doing that at home from a computer, right?" So there's a big section of the population for whom they never went home.

Matthew Crawford (07:04):

So you have to enable them from an IT perspective. And then there's, what we're finding now is there's this middle ground happening as people recognize that, okay, in some cases a hundred percent remote works perfectly fine. In some cases, you need that flexibility. And sometimes in-person collaboration to really achieve what you're doing. And so from an IT perspective, as an IT leader, when I talk to folks, what they're really struggling with is, "Okay, how do I be flexible? How do I enable kind of an all of the above solution, and have that platform that can help me do it." Because if you have a crystal ball that says exactly how 2021 is unfolding, then let's go buy a lottery ticket. But most people, they know they have to plan for that eventuality of both, not either-or.

Kevin L. Jackson (07:51):

But you know, data security is always really an important consideration. And I was really fascinated about what Citrix has really been doing with the zero-trust framework. And one thing in particular at the Citrix cloud security summit, I actually learned a lot about the work you're doing with Google and how you're leveraging Chrome to have this agentless... Well, it's not really agentless. I mean, it's using the browser to enforce this consistency around security and policies. Consistency and standardization is something that enterprises typically don't have. What's the real story here with the security aspect?

Matthew Crawford (08:54):

Well, you mentioned consistency and being able to apply these policies. I think there's been a paradigm shift over the last several years, right? In the old days there was this, okay, lock it down, I'll call it the castle and moat security approach.

Kevin L. Jackson (09:09):

Right.

Matthew Crawford (09:10):

Get your arms around everything, and then allow access, but the kind of unfortunate side effect is that if you allow access, they have everything inside the kingdom. And so that can be problematic. And that idea evolved. People realize that the kingdom of your data center expanded to the cloud, and so that created problems. But then, we kind of kept that same paradigm. It's like, okay, we'll make it virtual. We'll make a virtual moat around our castle. And that helped for a little bit, but it's that paradigm has actually been shaken even more and more this year.

Matthew Crawford (09:48):

And the zero-trust concept has been coming along for several years. But as you mentioned, with desktop trends or digital transformation, and all these other concepts that got accelerated with the pandemic, this is another one that people were thinking about for a long time, and it just sort of really put it in harsh relief. And the reason is, this castle and moat approach is, from an all or nothing perspective, can lead to actually security concerns, right? You have a device and you say, "Okay, I'm going to trust this device." It comes into the kingdom of your data center, then all bets are off. And so really, the zero-trust approach is, okay, we're going to authenticate, but we're going to have people have access to just the things that they need, just the application they need, and then continuously monitor and evaluate.

Matthew Crawford (10:38):

So once they're in, you don't trust them. You keep evaluating and monitoring, and that's a different, it's a different way to think about security that people are embracing. Now, when it comes to Citrix, we've been thinking along these terms, actually, since the evolution of the company, to be honest with you. Now it wasn't called zero trust, but this idea that you don't necessarily provide the keys to the kingdom as a security model has been there from the beginning. And you mentioned the partnership with Google, that's been around for a long time as well. And you need to trust what's on the device. In fact, on a Chromebook, there's not a whole lot on there, right? It's just the web browser.

Matthew Crawford (11:15):

So you've eliminated a whole, a whole angle of attack, right? By having viruses and things sitting there on their device, and key loggers, and all these kinds of things that are sitting there, but you still need to access corporate resources. And so the partnership with Google started with virtualization, accessing a virtual desktop in the data center and being able to get that, and just see the presentation of that. And now it's evolved even further, as you mentioned, in terms of just directly accessing SAS applications, so that it just provides this seamless and secure experience, like you said, through a web browser, that's a zero trust experience, meaning that we're constantly assessing the security posture, and enabling people to have a choice of device like Chromebooks, for example.

Kevin L. Jackson (12:04):

Wow. That's pretty fascinating. So, how is this going to evolve in the future? I mean, this whole Nirvana of unlocking the potential of your employees and giving them, really, the freedom to be productive from anywhere, like an Airstream.

Matthew Crawford (12:29):

Right.

Kevin L. Jackson (12:29):

So how is this going to evolve?

Matthew Crawford (12:33):

Well, what we're seeing more and more is that the old way of thinking of look, if I just give people the tools as an IT professional, right? If I just give people, okay, you have your laptop, we're good. Oh, you need applications. All right, you have your applications, we're good. And where we see things evolving and where Citrix is moving, is not just giving people the tools to do work, making that work that they do frictionless and removing the roadblocks that are in their way, that you may not have even thought are there. And one of the things is, I mentioned this digital work experience that Citrix workspace provides. It's unified, it brings everything together. And we talked about security. But it's also intelligent in the sense that it's not just that we provide the applications, we actually make getting work in those applications easier.

Matthew Crawford (13:21):

There's so many cases and workflows where there's an application that you only use once in a while, just as an example. And you have to remember how to access it. A lot of people are familiar with the PTO example, or maybe requesting a service ticket in Service Now, or things like that, that maybe you do very infrequently. But in order to do that task, you have to open up the application, navigate through the application, select the right buttons. And so, it actually adds a lot of friction, especially when you multiply this over several applications. So providing a way for people to just complete discrete tasks within their workspace, is actually, we think of it as a game-changer. Removing that friction and freeing people to kind of get deep and focused on the work that they really are hired to do.

Kevin L. Jackson (14:12):

Okay. Well, great. So, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me about the future of work and I've really enjoyed learning so much about Citrix and what they have done and how they're changing the future, and really protecting the enterprise data, no matter where it is.

Matthew Crawford (14:41):

Yeah. And I really appreciate that. We've kind of gone back and forth between employee experience and security and talking about the two experiences at the same time, because it really is hand in hand, right? You can't have one without the other.

Kevin L. Jackson (14:54):

Right, right.

Matthew Crawford (14:54):

Security goes along with having a great experience, and you can't have a great experience and not have it be secure. So that really, we have to talk about those things hand in hand. So I appreciate the conversation.

Kevin L. Jackson (15:04):

No, thank you very much. And this has been a great experience for me. So everyone, thanks a lot, Matt, and thank you Citrix. Today's my last day in the Airstream, but hopefully, I'll get an opportunity to unlock my potential again. So, thanks a lot, Matt.

Matthew Crawford (15:24):

Thank you, Kevin.

This article is sponsored by Citrix.