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This blog is intended to keep customer's of Quantix up to date with the latest technical and product news on Juniper products.

Monday, 4 August 2008

Considering Citrix?


Historically if an organisation wanted to securely publish internal applications to a remote workforce via the web, then Citrix (in it's various guises) was seen as the only viable option.
With this though came the often experienced frustrations, namely, cost (Citrix is not cheap), compatibility, administration and printing...I'm sure those of you who are reading this are shuddering at those two words... Citrix & Printing....

Anyway, now there is an alternative... Many of you may have either read about or have tested the new Terminal services offered within Windows 2008. The most intriguing element being the new RemoteApp functionality. In a nutshell RemtoeApp is the ability to publish applications in a seamless terminal service window. To compliment this, new to Windows 2008 is the ability to deploy these remote applications via a web portal or buy distributing .msi files via AD.

This new functionality is a direct attack by Microsoft on the remote app publication space that has previously been dominated by Citrix. An judging by the results, it may well be successful.

Taking the above one step further is the ability to publish these remote applications securely over the web. This previously was carried out using Citrix Nfuse, using SSL as the means of encryption.

But, with the recent release of version 6.2 of the Juniper SSL VPN software with native support Windows 2008 Terminal Services and more importantly the RemoteApp functionality this has finally created a direct alternative to Citrix Presentation server.

Using the Juniper SSL VPN to 'front end' Windows 2008 Terminal Services not only provides a more scalable and secure alternative to Citrix, but it does it at a fraction of the cost and with out the inherent frustrations.

For more information about the Juniper SSL VPN go to: http://www.quantix-uk.com/SSLVPN.aspx or feel free to contact one of our Juniper Consultants on 0115 983 6200

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