The landscape of business in the Philippines has changed. Despite some offices slowly resuming to normalcy, many are now still more open to allowing a hybrid or even pure remote work schedule. This increase of remote work has helped increased mobility but could have security implications if not addressed properly.
Remote workers may be connecting to cloud-hosted or SaaS applications with commodity Internet. This scenario lacks consistent, fast and secure access to applications. There may even be some cases when employees often disconnect from their VPN clients when accessing web and SaaS applications which leaves them unprotected and vulnerable to threats.
Hence, security measures can be increased by backhauling the traffic to the data center to mitigate these threats. However, these can come at the cost of application performance as it bottlenecks traffic.
The challenge of remote access is balancing the user experience and security. Users want to be able to access applications through any device at any time. To create an environment to facilitate this while maintaining corporate security standards is required.
This is where Citrix Secure Internet Access (SIA) can help. It offers a comprehensive, cloud-delivered security architecture to protect your users, regardless of their location.
Network Security for Remote Access
Citrix SIA can secure all access to your Internet and SaaS apps. Web applications such as Google Drive, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday, YouTube, Facebook or even just Internet browser traffic are within the scope of SIA’s securing capabilities. It does this through the following:
Inspect all Internet traffic
Personal devices are great for user experience but do not have the safety mechanisms found in corporate devices. Threat actors take advantage of this through Internet browsing or SaaS traffic as they use compromised devices. By allowing a proxy to inspect all incoming traffic, it greatly reduces the risk of malicious attacks to your network through a multitude of security checks before it reaches your datacenter.
Allowing the proxy to do this also allows it to focus more on load balancing requests which results in a better user experience. This is crucial as the increased number of requests coming from outside the network will typically need to do both security checks and grant access requests, which results to a bottleneck that slows down performance.
Block malware attacks to the network
By leveraging Citrix SIA’s database of known threats, detecting malicious activities becomes faster and remediations to it are applied sooner. Website access can also be allowed or blocked by comparing requested URLs with a filtering database that is defined per organizational policy.
Malware is a big factor when considering a security solution, as knowing what kind of attack on your system is a big advantage when you are inspecting incoming traffic. This is something that can save your business time and expenses in the long run.
Isolate new and unknown threats through sandbox
When considering the nature of threats, there will come a time when your security check will encounter a threat not part of any known database. This is something to be expected as many new threats are being made everyday and updates don’t come fast enough to the database. Citrix SIA handles this through sandboxing suspicious traffic or files. By isolating the suspicious activity or file in a simulated environment, you allow your network to test in real time what could happen in the real environment through simulation. This can help determine the nature of the suspicious file or activity and greatly minimize the risk it would have to your network.
Provide secure direct Internet access for better user experience
With Citrix SIA acting as the proxy for the data center to ensure these security policies are enforced, users will be able to directly access the Internet and SaaS applications instead. This greatly improves the response time of applications and Internet browsing experience.
Companies no longer have to route their user’s Internet traffic back to their data center for security checks to prevent users from accessing potentially dangerous or unproductive web pages that can cause sub-optimal performance for applications due to the roundabout way traffic is routed. With a direct Internet access, users remain consistently protected no matter where they are.
Consolidate your network security products for simplified management
Businesses have increased the number of security products implemented into their infrastructure over the years to address different security measures. However, these solutions can increase the complexity of your IT infrastructure because of the lack of visibility and scalability.
Citrix SIA can help consolidate your network security and monitor activities by providing you a single dashboard to monitor all network security which can be monitored through the cloud. It also is easily deployable to users needing no need for IT assistance while maintaining a simple and intuitive user interface. With a cloud-delivered architecture, you can easily scale up even as new applications, users or locations are added.
Citrix SIA is just one service in a bigger solution offering that Citrix just launched. We will be discussing the other services within the Citrix SASE offering in other articles to come, so please look forward to it!