Microsoft joins the Citrix Ready Workspace Security Program

Microsoft has joined the Citrix Ready Workspace Security Program and will complement security for Microsoft Office 365 customers by integrating with Citrix’s security service Citrix Access Control.
Citrix and Microsoft have partnered on innovative IT technology for more than 30 years. The collaboration initially focused on delivering Microsoft Windows apps and desktops, then expanded to provide mobile applications and devices. Today, while businesses are transforming and IT is leading the charge, it’s the unique engineering partnership between Citrix and Microsoft that enables us to deliver on enhanced security for SaaS applications across a broad set of customer scenarios.
Microsoft Office 365 offers tremendous value to customers in terms of improving productivity, user experience, and security. In fact, Office 365 includes intelligent security controls to help ensure your data is secure, such as multi-factor authentication, threat protection with advanced analytics, as well as data-loss prevention policies that not only help secure your data, but also help to ensure it is accessed only by authorized users.
“The integration of Microsoft Office 365 with Citrix Access Control adds a tremendous set of capabilities that allow our customers to get increased visibility and control for SaaS applications, while preventing unauthorized disclosure of information stored in SaaS apps,” said Manoj Raisinghani, Vice President of Citrix Networking and Security services.
Citrix Access Control enhances Office 365 native security features in the following ways:
- Single sign-on experience: Existing and new Citrix virtualization customers who use the Citrix Workspace app to access their virtual apps and desktops can use it to access SaaS apps like Office 365. This helps to enhance the user experience because an employee needs to login to Workspace app and get SSO across all their applications, desktops, and data. Citrix provides pre-built SAML templates for configuring SaaS apps (including Office 365) for ease of configuration.
- Multi-factor authentication: The Citrix Workspace app provides multi-factor authentication with a one-time password, natively, using Microsoft authenticator or the Citrix SSO app.
- Web filtering policies for Office 365: Citrix Access Control provides additional web filtering policies so you can block access to blacklisted URLs for your users. In addition, you can also redirect a user internet session to go through Citrix Secure Browser service, which is an isolated browser streamed from Citrix Cloud. Using this service, your users can access the internet without you worrying about malicious content hitting your network.
- End-to-end visibility and analytics: Together with advanced analytics, Citrix Access Control enables IT and security teams to identify and prevent malicious user behavior. With risk indicators and criteria to help detect user anomalies when using Office 365 applications, admins can configure the policy controls to quickly identify and alert IT about bad or risky user behavior. This lowers the risk of insider threats and enables IT to deliver a secure digital workspace.
“We are pleased to see Citrix’s commitment to Microsoft Office 365, said Mike Ammerlaan, director, Microsoft Office 365 Ecosystem at Microsoft. “Working with partners like Citrix helps ensure our customers have options for helping to ensure the security of their SaaS applications.”