Citrix ADC is a critical solution for many businesses around the globe and the effective management, maintenance and monitoring of the deployment is paramount to a successful use case of the ADC. Whether it’s used purely as a secure access gateway and load balancer for StoreFront, or a more advanced deployment taking advantage of features such as Application Firewall and SSL offloading, the device plays a key role in delivering applications, desktops and services to users.
With security, performance and user experience being constantly flagged as key business objectives from a technology perspective, gone are the days of ‘Set & Forget’ when it comes to the management of Citrix ADC. The ever-changing landscape of tech makes it extremely difficult for administrators to have the assurance that their deployment is secure, optimised and providing the best possible user experience. I wrote about the basics of securing Citrix ADC a while back but even in the light of the major Citrix vulnerability CVE-2019-19781 many deployments are at risk due to lack of proper management. My colleague, Matt Gorman gave an excellent write up on CVE-2019-19781 for those that may still be at risk, found here.
In response to recent developments and the ever-growing importance of remote working, we now have a specific service to manage, monitor and maintain Citrix ADC deployments, aptly named, Citrix ADCaaS. The service provides deep insights into all facets of the solution:
Continually Optimised Managed Services
Unlike traditional Managed Service offerings which stop at break-fix and patches, our continually optimised promise keeps your services up to date and ready for whatever the future brings.
Monitor
We offer 24×7 proactive monitoring, incident support and monthly reporting including:
- Insights into all aspects of the Citrix user experience
- Performance metrics across the Citrix environment that identify the root cause of performance issues
- Analytics and insights through historical reports for capacity planning, rightsizing, and infrastructure optimisation
User Experience
- We measure user experience, not just network metrics, to help you understand how your services are performing and what needs addressing
Enhance
- We keep you up to date with product enhancements which have the potential to further improve service levels
- Ensure the best possible user experience from your investment without the overhead of internal resource with a tailored Citrix ADCaaS. A fully managed solution which allows you to use our expertise to deliver your SLAs
- Use cases vary so we offer a range of support services to give you the right level of cover for your SLAs. Proactive continual improvement programs help to ensure service stability with traditional break-fix support also available to complement mandatory vendor offerings. Remote hands for rapid incident remediation or onsite support for major incidents with automated integration with vendor ticketing systems for improved communication flow.
Service Value
Following the recent Citrix ADC vulnerability, several of our clients extended their managed service to include ADCaaS to alleviate the management effort and stress when the unexpected happens. Specific drivers supporting the adoption of the service were:
- Time to resolution
- Awareness and tracking of vulnerabilities
- Internal capabilities and resource availability
We identified a common trend in feedback whereby our clients saw value from the get-go in areas they didn’t expect and were not part of their immediate needs and drivers:
- Alert on expiring SSL certs
- Identify problems with intermittent network issues
- Insights to application enumeration, availability, and performance
Case in point, a number of issues were recently identified and resolved for a specific client of ours, and as part of our rigorous onboarding process., these issues, which had not been identified prior, were causing poor user experience and application performance. This is where ADCaaS provides true value, over and above the standard maintenance tasks such as patching, certificate management and availability monitoring that we provide.
Citrix ADCaaS is fast becoming a favourite in our Managed Service offerings. If you would like to know more about our services, get in touch so we can schedule a demo and better understand how we can help. We have flexible service levels that can be further customised to your specific needs.