* VPN management issues crop up as Citrix integrates its broad range of technologies
Citrix has been amassing a broad range of technologies over the past few years including an SSL VPN gateway, and the results offer a lesson about how to defend your network from traffic coming from the Internet.
The bottom line is it’s not simple, and the best you can apparently hope for is an architecture with a slew of parts that can be managed from a central console that simplifies configuration and integrates data from as many of the parts as possible.
The diagram Citrix uses to describe its products shows six of them – SSL VPN, WAN optimization, application firewall, password manager, data center accelerator, and software to stream content – distributed at the junction between the LAN and the WAN. Then if you want to use light clients on the remote machine, you might also have a Citrix Presentation Server lined up there as well.
The bottom line is that no matter how popular they become, multifunction devices that sit between the Internet and the private network will not perform all the functions as corporations will want to protect applications and have them perform optimally.
That’s not necessarily bad because corporations may want to pick and choose the vendors they want to perform different functions. But the tradeoff is a lot of separate devices to manage and a lot of separate expertise to develop if the business wants to manage them all in-house.
In the case of Citrix, better management of its disparate devices should be near the top of the list and development of integrated, multifunction devices should be farther down the list. It makes sense to poll customers in the meantime to find out if they want such devices at all and if so what features they want on them.
