ORLANDO – Cyber security has become a hot-button topic as society increasingly enters the digital age. And as the threat of cyber attacks intensifies, securing devices, networks, applications, and workspaces has become all the more important.
Citrix Systems Inc. has announced Citrix Analytics, a new security and behaviour analytics platform, at its annual Synergy conference in Orlando, an offering which extends the company’s NetScaler Management and Analytics System (MAS) with new behaviour detection, insights, and proactive risk resolution capabilities.
“This is the next step in our journey of helping IT and security professionals get complete visibility on what’s going on in their organization’s environment, and stopping any threats,” Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov tells the audience at Synergy. “It’s very valuable to protect in a proactive manner. With Citrix Analytics, IT managers can see what’s happening with content in their environment, how and where it’s being moved, what’s happening with end users, how are they accessing data, are they violating security protections, etc.”
Leveraging artificial intelligence abilities and machine learning algorithms, this security offering collects and analyzes data across the Citrix product portfolio – including XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, ShareFile and NetScaler – and monitors users in real time for any suspicious behaviour.
“For example, let’s say I typically login in around 8:00 AM every day from Fort Lauderdale and open Outlook, Chrome and Slack. This becomes system-learned behaviour,” Calvin Hsu, vice president of product marketing, explains. “What if this behaviour changes radically and suddenly my account is accessed at 3:00 AM from another country and large data files are being sent over the network? The Citrix analytics engine scores that behaviour to assign a threat risk and introduce additional security challenges or even quarantine or block my access.”
Citrix Analytics tracks all user activity on an organization’s system and can identify high-risk users if it detects an anomaly in their behaviour, such as a sudden increase in downloaded data. This lets IT departments “find and quickly troubleshot application infrastructure performance issues,” Tatarinov says.
“This means that no security administrators are woken up at 3:00 AM to deal with a potential security breach – Analytics does it all on its own, and can even quarantine an account if there is suspicious activity,” Hsu explains to the crowd at Synergy.
The solution is available on Citrix Cloud and works in both public and private clouds, as well as hybrid and on premise.
Hsu says this proactive monitoring, coupled with behaviour analytics and a software-defined security perimeter, will help organizations detect threats sooner and solve issues faster.