"Follow-Me Data" Means Secure Seamless Access to Work Whereever and Whenever You Need It!

This blog was originally posted to http://blogs.citrix.com/author/benjaminb/ on May 25, 2011:

We’ve all seen the impact of seamless cloud storage solutions permeate our daily work lives. You have that DropBox or Box.net account and, for convenience sake and access anywhere, you casually drop that work file into the synchronized folder. Well there it goes into cloud storage infrastructure – out of the well-managed, secure control of your IT organization. Who knows how many corporate secrets now lie outside of the firewall? You know that employee that left your company last week? Did you really get all of his files or is he still accessing the files he stored outside of the network? While certainly convenient and device ubiquitous these solutions are keeping your IT organizations up at night.

Citrix, as the leader in Virtual Computing, is coming to provide both the end user flexibility and freedom, but with all the security and data management IT has long demanded.

Business Safe Zone in the Personal Cloud

Today Citrix announced its vision for seamless Enterprise data access as part of an end user’s Personal Cloud. The Citrix solution will be delivered securely as a Safe Zone plug-in to Citrix Receiver and will make Enterprise stored data and files accessible on any device, anywhere. The Safe Zone plug-in “Follow-Me Data” solution provides access to Enterprise- and cloud-based file and data storage with all the management, authentication, control and security features expected by IT administrators fully integrated into Citrix award-winning, cross-platform Receiver solution.

What Does This Mean?

In an era of cloud-based services and web-based access to virtually everything, end users are building a tremendous amount of documents, files and web-based applications and personal identities in a “Personal Cloud.” A critical piece of this Personal Cloud is secure integration of an end users business life. “Follow-Me Data” is about providing seamless work access to data and files through the development and extension of secure, IT controlled cloud accessible storage. “Follow-Me Data” provides an easy, yet secure and completely manageable, single view of all Enterprise storage options – including network and locally stored data, Sharepoint collaboration documentation and even cloud storage – via Citrix Receiver. The solution will provide all data and files – password protected – to end users from any device, anywhere. In addition the solution will leverage IT data security best practices for white listing, encryption and device wipe.

“Follow-Me” Data provides a solution that enables end users to get access to their work data and files – from any device, anywhere -regardless of where it is stored in the Enterprise intranet. IT maintains control over the data – how it is used, secured, managed and ultimately destroyed.

• Enterprise data securely managed and securely delivered to any platform anywhere: Coupled tightly to Citrix Receiver, “Follow-Me Data” Safe Zone technology provides unique enterprise class data management with ease and simplicity of consumer’s Personal Cloud access from any device anywhere.

• By leveraging Citrix Receiver, enterprise customers immediately gain cross-platform, secure authentication values at the heart of Receiver. In addition Enterprise customers also gain the centralized management functionality long missing from distributed and cloud storage solutions on the market today. Enterprise class management includes file-based control, secure and remote wipe, and tight integration with active directory authentication.

• The Citrix “Follow-Me Data” solution will be an open, SAML-based architecture that provides the necessary framework for Cloud storage providers to plug-in secure and seamless access to Cloud data stores. Coupled with Cloud Gateway SaaS management solutions from Citrix, the “Follow-Me Data” solution will be able to provide enterprise security to, for example, corporate DropBox, Box.Net or SugarSynch implementations. By leveraging open standards for identify federation, “Follow-Me Data” will provide the mechanism for any third party provider to immediately gain the benefits of a fully-integrated, cross-platform, device independent enterprise data solution.