Public sector is a major user of Citrix solutions to extend the reach of existing application investments - and are looking to extend that investment for secure mobile and agile working

There are a number of drivers that lead public sector customers to deploy Citrix solution, among which are:

• A growing need for users to be more mobile
• Application performance issues
• Reduce power requirements and costs
• Existing packaged application solutions the software are too large and cumbersome to roll out using traditional methods

This often leads to councils running tens or even hundreds of Citrix servers. Many of these Citrix users are looking to implement a mobile solution on top of their Citrix investment that will improve performance levels for mobile workers while helping to cut costs across the organisation. Any such system also needs to be compatible with Government Connect security requirements.

It is not unusual for us to meet customers with 100 or more Citrix production servers, with on average about 20 users connected to each of these servers at any given time. As their deployments evolve, their IT Group often compliment their investment with some form of remote software distribution tool to publish software updates and upgrades to those remote client devices.

As the implementation matures, IT Groups often find a key challenge in dealing with wireless connectivity issues, together with capacity demands and increasing cost of the server farm. As users move across wireless LANs within the office, or try to use their systems with cellular connections when mobile,  they increasingly become aware that wireless access is intermittent. When users lose coverage and hence lose connectivity, it would disconnect their Citrix session. We have customers where their users were working on documents for 45 minutes, suddenly lose their network connection and get kicked out of the application, with all their work lost. This clearly undermines productivity and ROI, and creates a lot of frustration and makes for dissatisfied users.

Even in an office-based Wi-Fi environment, disconnects occur when roaming isn't smooth. For example, moving in the office onto a different wireless subnet, at times the handoff to the new IP address  causes a brief disconnection from the network. This momentary loss of coverage can cause the Citrix server to assume that the user had logged off and thus terminate their session - again causing the user's data to be lost and requiring re-logging in to the network, restarting applications, and redoing previously completed work.

Help is at hand.

An increasing number of public sector customers who have taken up the no-cost evaluation of NetMotion Mobility to remedy the situation, after trialling various other solutions. Feedback from these customers indicates that Mobility XE from NetMotion Wireless addressed their needs, as it  provides secure, CoCo compliant, continuous remote access to network resources and applications from mobile devices over any wired or wireless IP-based network. Customer report that it insulates applications from loss connectivity (whether momentary or for extended periods) allowing those application sessions to remain active. Once network connectivity has been re-established, Mobility XE seamlessly reconnects the remote device to the applications it was accessing - without user intervention. Customers state that it made their connectivity disruptions disappear. As an example, if a user lost their network connection or roamed to a different subnet, Mobility XE masked these disruptions or IP address changes from the Citrix server. In doing so, it kept the Citrix session alive, which in turn meant that the applications continued to function.

In summary, NetMotion Mobility XE meets a number of key criteria for IT Groups

• first, it worked exactly as promised
• secondly, it is low cost to implement and easy to support and scale up. (A single Mobility XE server support up to 1,500 concurrent users.) Management and ongoing support costs are important factors to consider and Mobility XE consistently lowered help desk costs and removed time wastage due to help desk calls from users in the field
• Mobility XE is typically more secure than the existing security implementation in most customers, and as such helps achieve Government Connect CoCo compliance where greater levels of security are demanded

Installing Mobility XE involves deploying client software to remote devices and also server software within the IT infrastructure. The server install typically takes around a hour with a little preparation work, and it is not unusual to hear of customer who accelerate deployments to remote devices, achieving in days what they had planned to do in weeks due to the ease and transparency of the NetMotion Mobility client install. Typically, once deployed, end users see no change to their sign-on procedure. Mobility XE uses existing authentication methods, so from the users' perspective the only change they experience is continuous connectivity to applications and no disruptions to their Citrix sessions.

One of our customers reports that there was an unexpected benefit that they derived from Mobility XE. They can now keep their devices' Network Interface Card (NIC) drivers current without disrupting  users. Before, they could push updates to machines, but this would require resetting the network card which dropped the user's connection. But with Mobility XE, their connection still functions keeping the session alive. To that customer, it is a "huge benefit" and they have seen a 30% reduction in support requests from users.

NetMotion Mobility XE also features a rich set of management tools and reports to support  managers' control over their wireless deployments. For example, using Mobility XE's reporting capabilities, managers can monitor the current battery life on each device, monitor applications, network usage, user and device activity. They ability to raise email alerts when unwanted activity is triggered is extremely useful, providing with a continuous view of each device, each user and application, letting managers know when to engage proactively to  alert a user.

The Gershon Report increased public sector awareness of what mobility can do to improve working practices. Achieving this without technology impacting productivity can increase staff efficiency and ultimately help improve ROI outcomes. Click here for a no cost evaluation of NetMotion  Mobility XE for your organisation to see how it could provide you with a seamless, stable environment for you and your users to work in.