Citrix CloudGateway 2 Hones Mobile Message
Warming up a live audience before Citrix VP Sumit Dhawan announced Citrix CloudGateway 2 and its MDX mobile experience technology, Simon Yates, Forrester VP and Research Director made it crystal clear CIOs are under siege by the runaway proliferation of mobile technology, and the demands it puts on them to support any device, application or work style across organizations with thousands of people.
"Mobility, frankly, is something CIOs just can't stop," Yates declared, adding that 50 percent of people who buy smart phones and use them at work do so without concern relating to whether or not the company's IT organization will support the devices. Focusing on tablets, he said that by 2016, 750 million tablets will be in use and some 350 million will be sold in that year alone. "Tablets are becoming business-ready devices," he stated.
In such a diverse world -- Citrix claims typical corporate employees use three devices a day -- centralized device management is a craving that is common to those beleaguered CIOs, and Dhawan cited it first in a list that is satisfied by CloudGateway 2 with MDX. Other needs also satisfied by MDX mobile app technologies include security and control over native iOS, Android and HTML 5 apps across an estimated two billion mobile devices.
Citrix thus makes the following declaration (which sounds somewhat Horizon-esque): "With these new additions, CloudGateway becomes the first product in the industry to offer customers a single, unified control point for all mobile, web, SaaS and Windows apps and data, across any mix of corporate and personal devices." That's a strong statement by a company that has definitely been doing its homework.
There are four primary components of MDX technology. The first is MDX App Vault, a secure, native, mobile app container technology that brings order to BYOD environments by separating mobile enterprise apps and data from personal apps and data on any mobile device. This gives some control back to IT departments, because it allows them to remotely manage, control, lock and wipe critical business apps and data.
MDX Web Connect is a secure mobile browser technology designed to make it easy for IT to deliver internal corporate web apps, HTML 5 mobile web apps, and external SaaS apps to mobile devices via a dedicated browser instance for each app. Cisco says MDX Micro VPN is the first app-specific secure access technology that enables IT to create secure VPN tunnels for mobile and web apps accessing internal corporate networks from personal mobile devices.
The fourth MDX component, MDX Policy Orchestration, offers granular, policy-based control over native mobile and HTML 5 apps based on factors such as type of service, type of network, user passcode, login frequency, and whether or not a device has been jail-broken.
Citrix also announced that CloudGateway 2 supports not only native mobile apps delivered through MDX, but also integration with Citrix ShareFile. For example, using CloudGateway with ShareFile, companies can give employees access to their files on any device they choose through seamless role-based management. Data associated with native mobile apps or Windows apps hosted by Citrix XenApp is also easily accessible, and can follow the employee across any of the devices being used.
Citrix further unveiled the addition of MDX support to Citrix Receiver. Combined with CloudGateway 2, the new Receiver clients are said to deliver a consistent follow-me experience for apps and data.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/01/2012 at 12:48 PM