Citrix Systems White Paper Sample

Overview

As the global business environment has evolved, companies have significantly expanded their reliance on remote and mobile access to business applications over the Internet. Applications that must be available to employees in the field, in branch offices and in home offices are increasingly delivered via a corporate intranet or portal. Further, for many organizations, externally facing websites are an integral component of day-in/day-out business interactions with customers, suppliers and partners. In addition, due to the incorporation of Web 2.0 functionality, applications have become far more dynamic and interactive compared to their predecessors. For all these reasons, businesses recognize they cannot function effectively without a robust solution to ensure uninterrupted, secure and high-performance access to network-based business applications and corporate websites.

This reliance upon Internet-delivered applications has also changed how businesses look at their underlying network infrastructure. On one hand, organizations’ understanding of how critical network infrastructure works has never been higher. On the other, companies want to know explicitly how the network is enhancing their ability to deliver new application services. To a business, the network’s value is not its own availability, performance and security, but rather its ability to improve the availability, performance and security of the businesses applications it serves.

As such, networks must evolve from highways designed to push packets into more-active participants in the end-to-end delivery of application services. For this to occur, many components of the network will need to evolve at a fundamental level.....