you are in a business with several branch offices dispersed over a wide geographical area, you most likely have experienced major headaches and possibly high blood pressure deploying and managing line-of-business (LOB) applications. For most businesses, the immediate solution has been to deploy isolated LOB applications at each branch including the headquarters and write code that will consolidate the data from the various branches into the HQ system. Fortunate companies are able to do this with minimum grief but not after contending with some major problems such as having to deploy applications in several branches and support all these branches as well as developing data transfer and integration snippets of code to transfer and consolidate data into the HQ system. The latter is partly because the skills to develop and maintain such data transfer and integration tools do not exist in-house and when they do are expensive to retain. Another problem is the security exposure that such data download tools bring if not encrypted properly.
In recent times, the trend is towards server-based computing which essentially involves users from any workstation accessing core business logic and processing on a central server. These users could be on the local area network (LAN) or on a wide area network (WAN) accessing the server via various secure access methods. For remote users in Ghana, bandwidth is a major problem and where available, the costs are prohibitive.
Enter, Citrix Presentation Server – the industry-standard way of virtualizing application delivery through a centralized and secure architecture. Presentation Server will help you address the business challenges of rapid application deployment, secure remote access, enhanced security practices and ensure a consistent user experience for all. With Presentation Server, you no longer need to deploy your LOB applications across multiple desktops in remote locations. All you do is install the applications on your server and install Presentation Server on every client machine. Now every user will be able to access the business applications as though they were at the headquarters and on the HQ LAN. What Citrix Presentation Server does is to send a virtual image of the application screens to you on your remote desktop. No data leaves the HQ server thus eliminating the security risks in data transfer over a remote communication link.
Citrix Presentation Server is complementary to any computing paradigm, including server-based computing, full desktop applications, client/server applications or Web applications. This means that regardless of the type of LOB applications that you run in your organization, Citrix can do the job for you. New features of Presentation Server 4.0 include improved security, expanded application compatibility, increased server scalability and performance, broadened connectivity and device support and an improved end-user experience.
Presentation Server sits at the core of Citrix Access Infrastructure solutions and provides the basis upon which all the other Citrix applications such as Access Gateway, Password Manager and Citrix GoTo suite function. Citrix Access Gateway, for example is a universal SSL VPN that provides simple, secure desk-like access to any IT resource and combines the best features of IPSec and SSL VPN without any of the limitations associated with SSL VPN.
With the Advanced Control option, Citrix Access Gateway provides users with “Sense-and-Respond” capabilities to not only grant or deny access to appropriate applications, but also to control the level of user action rights for each application or resource accessed. So although a user may have access to certain aspects of a line-of-business (LOB) application when logged onto the local network when the same user attempts to access the same application remotely certain features will be restricted. Likewise Password Manager provides enterprise single-sign-on (SSO) functionality that enhances security because users have to remember a single password to access any company application regardless of the different passwords that have been previously set for any of these applications.
Businesses all over the world are constantly looking to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and seek savings from as many sources as possible. Ghanaian Finance and IS Directors can drastically reduce support costs and the need for support staff by deploying Citrix Presentation Server across the corporate WAN or as a tool for remote support. Citrix drastically reduces bandwidth costs unlike traditional server-based solutions. It enables employees work remotely, so that when your CEO is in Abuja, Nigeria, he or she does not have to be incommunicado and unproductive.
By Kizito Owusu-Agyeman
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