Synergy 2011: Netscaler additions bring cloud front and back doors

Citrix Synergy

Citrix has launched additions to its Netscaler line-up, designed to give IT departments greater visibility over hybrid cloud environments.

The Cloud Gateway and Cloud Bridge products give administrators greater control over what Citrix calls the front and back doors to private and public clouds.

With the Gateway, IT can orchestrate how apps are delivered to end users over cloud environments, enabling them to enforce consistent policies for compliance and access control over a single interface.

Administrators can also enjoy license management capabilities across private and public cloud apps and services, so service level agreements are worth the investment.

The single sign-on functionality means end users can access all apps delivered over the cloud as soon as they have signed into one app being watched over through the Gateway.

"What it gives is a single app catalogue that is personalised across enterprise, cloud and consumer apps so we don't create silos," said Sunii Potti, vice president of product marketing at Citrix.

"This will be a seamless integrated view across all my app siloes seeing it as one set of services. Cloud services need to be integrated in single management point."

The Gateway will be available from the third quarter of this year.

Building bridges

The Cloud Bridge offering is designed to provide a link between in-house data centres and the public cloud, ensuring end users won't notice when their services are being provided either from within or from outside.

The new service will help bring "infinite capacity" to businesses, Potti said.

"It extends the data centre seamlessly to outside, as if it's one large data centre with infinite capacity," he added.

"It will be fundamentally transformational to cloud adoption in enterprise."

Cloud Bridge allows IT to decide what portions of infrastructure they want to have on premise and what they are happy to have in the cloud, helping ease concerns around security of company data.

Sensitive data can be kept in company data centres, whilst other services can be delivered over the cloud, potentially enjoying the additional compute power and flexibility offered by outside sources.

The product will arrive by June in virtual and physical editions.

Tom Brewster

Tom Brewster is currently an associate editor at Forbes and an award-winning journalist who covers cyber security, surveillance, and privacy. Starting his career at ITPro as a staff writer and working up to a senior staff writer role, Tom has been covering the tech industry for more than ten years and is considered one of the leading journalists in his specialism.

He is a proud alum of the University of Sheffield where he secured an undergraduate degree in English Literature before undertaking a certification from General Assembly in web development.