Technology has caught up with business demands for fast and secure access to applications from anywhere in the world.
This is the view of Richard Jackson, visiting regional Citrix MD for UK, Ireland and SA.
"Business has long wanted flexibility in accessing applications and data, but the technology to make it possible has been around only for a couple of years," he says.
According to Jackson, the best way of using technology to meet these user needs and satisfy business requirements for security, continuity, and compliance, is to break away from traditional methods and use a single system for application delivery and control.
Connectivity solutions are evolving from providing access to application delivery, says Jackson. He says this change is reflected in the expansion of the Citrix product range through the acquisition of key application delivery technology, with emphasis on business continuity.
"A company can have the best network in the world, but if staff can't access applications and share information, the company will go out of business. Applications drive business," he says.
Citrix country manager Nick Keene says new-era application delivery methods typically use the smart application of virtualisation, compression and streaming technology. This results in reduced network latency as well as improved flow control, security and availability.
"Any company with application delivery challenges can benefit from this new approach, from organisations with as few as 50 users all the way up to enterprise level," he says.
Bandwidth and speed optimisation are also important, says Keene, particularly as the number of Web-based applications continue to increase. "Some forecasts say 50% of the world's applications will be Web-based by 2008," he says.
Improved quality of service is another benefit of centralised application delivery because it enables organisations to monitor the end user experience, identify the root cause of application performance problems and respond proactively, says Jackson.
This extends traditional monitoring of IT systems only, says Keene, and has the added benefit of delivering real time information to application developers to help them tackle the estimated 22% of user problems that are purely software related.
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