NetScaler sets up a revolving door to the cloud

Citrix has introduced two NetScaler products that act as a doorman for the enterprise cloud.

Citrix has introduced two NetScaler products that act as a doorman for the enterprise cloud. Photo credit: Citrix

At its Synergy conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the company unveiled NetScaler Cloud Bridge, a hardware and software package that helps to provide a secure buffer zone between organisations' public and private clouds. It also pushed out NetScaler Cloud Gateway, which secures and sets access for applications.

The cloud-networking products are designed to ease the process of migrating data and applications between public and private clouds. Cloud Gateway sits at the 'front door' of enterprise datacentres and organises the delivery of software-as-a-service, web and Windows applications to end users, according to Citrix. At the other end, Cloud Bridge sits at the 'back door', extending the workloads handled by a private datacentre to any external cloud service, it said.

Cloud Bridge forms "a transparent, secure and optimised tunnel between the on-premise enterprise datacentres and off-premise cloud datacentres", Citrix said in a statement.

The package uses encryption and management tools to allow organisations to specify the data that is allowed to go into the cloud. It responds to a spike in demand by automatically moving application workloads from the private datacentre to the public cloud.

Besides security, Cloud Bridge provides network acceleration and global server-load balancing. It also promises to give IT departments the ability to choose which parts of enterprise applications remain inside the private cloud and which components are able to burst out into the public cloud.

A virtualised Cloud Bridge can be loaded into an off-premise cloud, where it can be used by the business to provide a secure, encrypted access point and buffer zone between the on-premise datacentre and an external cloud, according to Citrix.

Cloud Gateway

The second new product, Cloud Gateway, is a management platform for setting access to Windows and mobile device applications from any type of cloud. It "helps enterprise IT streamline traditional silo-based architectures in favour of a much simpler, service-orientated approach", the company said.

Cloud Gateway supports single-sign on, identity and subscriber credentials and broad licence-management capabilities. It will be available as a virtualised software appliance, a high-security hardware appliance, or as a cloud-based service.

Cloud Gateway is scheduled for release in the third quarter, while Cloud Bridge is due within the first half of the year, either as a VPX virtual appliance or an MPX physical appliance. Cloud Bridge can also be bundled inside NetScaler Platinum Edition on the SDX, MDX or VPX appliance platforms.