Citrix and Palo Alto Networks team up on SD-WAN protection

Business is more global and collaborative than ever.

People work anywhere, anytime, on any number of devices and they access and share information and ideas across systems and borders.

This promises new levels of productivity and innovation that can transform entire industries – and create new ones.

But it also introduces new risks via an expanded attack surface that companies must vigilantly guard against.

Citrix Systems is expanding its network protection capabilities to help them do this.

The company today announced that it is collaborating with cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks to enable easy deployment and management of next-generation firewalls within Citrix SD-WAN, providing companies with added layers of security to protect their assets at branches and beyond.

"Applications and workloads are migrating to the cloud at a very aggressive rate and security needs to follow them," says Citrix SD-WAN and intelligent traffic management vice president Chalan Aras.

"With Palo Alto Networks, we can deliver an advanced SD-WAN security solution that enables companies to protect users, data and applications across branches, data centers and public clouds.

Citrix SD-WAN is a WAN Edge solution that delivers the automated, secure connectivity required to optimise performance of applications and drive strong user experience.

With the integration of the Palo Alto Networks VM-Series virtual next-generation firewalls and Prisma Access with the Citrix SD-WAN solution, distributed enterprises can enhance their network and cloud protection in a straightforward, cost-effective manner.

Leveraging Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator for unified management and control, IT organisations can:

• Build and enforce consistent access control policies based on applications and users across network and cloud
   
• Automate provisioning of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series next-generation firewall (NGFW) on the Citrix 1100 appliance, as a virtual network function (VNF)
   
• Automate connections to Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access cloud-based firewalls for consistent policy enforcement
   
• Streamline provisioning of multi-layer security services from Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator, available via Citrix Cloud
   
• Apply security zone segmentation to protect users, applications, and data

"In today's hybrid, multi-cloud world, security needs to be as agile as your applications, data and users," says Palo Alto Networks products senior vice president Adam Geller.

"Together with Citrix, we aim to deliver an integrated set of products that provide a consistent level of protection to users across the network and both public and private clouds.