Deliver Secure Access to Student and Institutional Data

Deliver Secure Access to Student and Institutional Data

With Citrix NetScaler, an application delivery controller, schools, colleges and universities across the country reduce costs while providing students, faculty and staff with on-­demand, secure mobile access to apps, data and services – without compromising security or compliance.

Citrix NetScaler

NetScaler can optimize, secure and control the delivery of education apps, cloud services, virtual desktops and mobile services via a single management platform with granular policy controls, auditing and reporting that help IT manage compliance, information governance and data protection.

In this solution brief, you’ll discover how Citrix NetScaler – whether deployed in the data center or in the cloud – helps academic institutions enable teaching and learning anywhere, anytime.

Features include:

• Security and compliance: Protect webinfrastructure against DDoS, SQL injection,XSS, and SSL attacks, and ensureregulatory/PCI compliance.

• Reliability: Securely deliver applicationswith full visibility and network analyticsfor all mobile, web and desktop traffic.

• Performance: Improve applicationperformance, including real-­time (VoIP)apps, for users no matter where they’relocated – at your main or remotecampuses, at home or even a coffee shop.

• Agility: Ensure learning continuity andIT disaster recovery, and grow capacityon demand.

• Consolidation: Reduce costs and controlappliance sprawl by consolidating multiplepoint solutions for remote access, loadbalancing, security, SSO and much more.

• Cost-­effective: Lower WAN expenses withthe SD-­WAN solution, which includesWAN virtualization, WAN optimizationand application management all in one.

Ensuring security and compliance

Today, schools worry less about the lone-­ wolf hacker creating nuisance viruses in a basement;; sophisticated foreign governments and organized crime rings are now the top cybersecurity threat to colleges and universities. That’s because these institutions, just like banks or healthcare organizations, exchange a great deal of private information.

A comprehensive application security solution, NetScaler helps education IT teams address security concerns, manage risk, and prevent attacks across web applications and portals while ensuring optimal performance of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other applications. This is crucial because academic institutions collect and process a high volume of sensitive data from students, faculty and staff, and that information is typically exchanged through web apps/ portals. These data entryways provide access to admissions materials, student loan information, course registration, student records and campus retail data.

To ensure performance and protect themselves against attack, many education institutions are relying on Citrix NetScaler as the secure point of access to education apps, ERPs, Microsoft and virtual apps.

Providing learning continuity, availability and disaster recovery

By protecting critical web apps and portals with NetScaler ADC, schools can now ensure high availability, data center failover, proximity-­based load balancing, and other critical functions.

That’s because NetScaler delivers 100-­ percent application uptime and no single point of failure by directing users to the right application resource.

• Global server load balancing (GSLB)extends this reliability worldwide toefficiently and intelligently distributeapplication traffic across multiple datacenters, enabling a resilient disasterrecovery solution.

• With Citrix NetScaler, if your primary datacenter goes down, users can be redirectedautomatically to a secondary site with noimpact to the user experience.

• NetScaler capabilities such as loadbalancing and GSLB across multiple datacenters ensure optimal performanceduring emergency situations and routineoperations alike.

In 2015, Citrix introduced industry-­leading SD-­WAN technology into the NetScaler product line. NetScaler SD-­WAN provides high availability of WAN circuits for redundancy and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) cost savings in the following ways:

• Network connectivity: As schools move tothe cloud and web-­based technologies, it’sno longer practical to link costly MPLS linesto data centers. Reducing the number oflines and moving to less expensive Internetconnections saves money.

• Cloud: Some NetScaler SD-­WAN servicescan also be hosted in the cloud, whichallows schools to get by with less on-­premises equipment in data centers. Virtualdeployments eliminate the need for newhardware such as firewalls and VPNs inremote campuses.

• Campus visits: Citrix SD-­WAN technologiesare developed for remote managementand zero touch deployment, which requiresfewer campus visits by IT staff.

The NetScaler solution enables users to software-­define their wide-­area network (WAN) by combining the intelligence of WAN virtualization, WAN optimization and application management into one comprehensive solution with end-­to-­end security. With Citrix SD-­WAN, you can ensure education application availability while reducing delivery costs.

Schools can also virtualize their WAN using a variety of connectivity options (MPLS, Ethernet, DSL, or wireless) for a more scalable, cost-­effective and cloud-­ready approach to mobile workspace delivery. The NetScaler SD-­WAN solution addresses the growing need of high bandwidth and reliable network connectivity across the WAN, and it improves business continuity while reducing bandwidth costs at remote campuses.

To learn more, watch the WAN Virtualization with CloudBridge video or the demo of WAN Virtualization with the Citrix CloudBridge Virtual WAN Solution.

Improved visibility and analytics

Only Citrix NetScaler Management and Analytics System (MAS) provides the visibility and analytics needed to ensure IT is delivering the best experiences for students, faculty and staff, regardless of where they’re located.

MAS features multiple engines for management, visibility, analytics and orchestration that are used to manage, monitor and troubleshoot the application delivery infrastructure from a single, unified console. This centralized management solution simplifies operations by providing administrators with enterprise-­wide visibility and automating management jobs that need to be executed across multiple instances.

All told, this family of Citrix solutions provides robust analytics insights, including:

Web Insight provides visibility into enterprise web applications and allows IT administrators to monitor web applications being served by the NetScaler ADC by providing integrated and real-­time monitoring of applications. Web Insight provides critical information such as user and server response time, enabling IT organizations to monitor and improve application performance.

HDX Insight provides end-­to-­end visibility for ICA traffic passing through NetScaler ADC. HDX Insight enables administrators to view real-­time client and network latency metrics, historical reports and end-­to-­end performance data, as well as troubleshoot performance issues.

Gateway Insight provides visibility into the failures that users encounter when logging on, regardless of the access mode. You can view the end-­point analysis (EPA), authentication, single sign-­on (SSO) and application launch failures for a user and much more.

Security Insight is a new security management, reporting and analytics tool that provides a single-­pane solution to help you assess application security status and take corrective actions to secure your applications when necessary. Network Reporting allows you to create custom reports of network statistics.

Orchestration

A. Cloud orchestration – NetScaler MASenables integration of NetScaler withOpenStack cloud orchestration. By usingthis feature with the OpenStack platform,OpenStack users benefit from the loadbalancing feature (LBaaS) of NetScaler.OpenStack users can then deploy their loadbalancer configurations from OpenStack inNetScaler instance.

B. Container orchestration – NetScaler MASenables you to deploy, manage, monitorand gain visibility into your NetScaler CPXinstances and application

Toward better learning outcomes

With Citrix NetScaler, today’s schools, colleges and universities can control their IT costs while accommodating modern learningpreferences – giving students, faculty and staff anywhere, anytime access to the apps, data and services they need to succeed. And because this on-­demand mobile access comes without compromises to security or compliance, everyone on campus comes out ahead.

Additional resources

To learn more, read:

• Delivering Secure Apps and Data AcrossDevices, Networks and Campuses

• Secure App Delivery for Today’s Mobile-­Ready Campus

For more information about Citrix solutions for education, please visit citrix.com/education

Enterprise Sales North America | 800-­424-­8749 Worldwide | +1 408-­790-­8000

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