While many companies viewed the shift to remote working in the pandemic as temporary and a bit of a pain. fashion brand , Marc O’Polo instead has designed a digital workspace that would allow its employees to work from anywhere.
To achieve this, Marc O’Polo has implemented a range of Citrix digital workspace solutions through which it can provide consistent, secure and reliable access to the systems, applications and data its team needs to get work done, wherever it needs to get done, including: Citrix DaaS, Citrix Gateway, Citrix Analytics for Security and Citrix Analytics for Performance.
To ensure its collections get in the hands of retail partners in over 30 countries in a timely manner requires reliable access to a host of graphics and creative applications, along with Enterprise Resource Planning software, which controls all the company’s production and sales processes.
“Our goal is to create conditions under which our 2,000 employees worldwide can develop their full creativity and work together optimally, wherever they happen to be,” explains Matthias Holzner, Manager IT Application & Collaboration, Marc O’Polo. “We are perfectly prepared for any configuration of the hybrid working world and can optimally support our flexwork strategy. Our employees can log in and work creatively from anywhere, thanks to Citrix infrastructure.”
Maximising security
One of the main challenges with enabling flexible and remote working is maintaining security. After being hit by a ransomware attack in 2019, Holzner and his team began a complete overhaul of the company’s IT infrastructure to improve the company’s security posture, and with support from Citrix Gold Solution Advisor Provectus Technologies, shifted management of its environment to Citrix Cloud, leaving only servers with virtual applications operated on-premises.
“This ensures that all updates and security patches are installed automatically and that the environment is always up to date,” Holzner says. It also provides for continuous monitoring and optimisation of the security and performance of the Marc O’Polo digital workspaces via Citrix Analytics for Security, which Holzner says play a central role in the company’s overall security strategy.
“The Citrix Analytics for Security dashboard gives us a complete overview of potential risks and uses traffic light colors to see where intervention is needed, and many actions can then be automated via policies,” Holzner adds. “If, for example, a user who was registered in Stephanskirchen during the day logs in from an address in Asia a few hours later, the account is immediately blocked and our team is notified.”
Enhancing user experience
In addition, the company uses Citrix Analytics for Performance to ensure its users have a reliable experience that enables them to perform at their best. By aggregating and presenting all relevant performance data, the service provides valuable insights and concrete troubleshooting suggestions the Marc O’Polo team can use to quickly identify and resolve issues and mitigate their impact. And it’s seeing results.
“Analytics for Performance has optimised our user support, as we can use it to find out very quickly why application response times are not satisfactory for individual-users,” Holzner says. “In one specific case, for example, we found outdated software clients on the user’s end devices, which were significantly slowing down login times, and fixed them right away.”
The new Citrix environment has also radically simplified IT. “We used to spend an average of one hour a day checking each system,” Holzner concludes. “Today, we can simply rely on the environment to be available and up to date.”
Marc O’Polo is among hundreds of retail organisations around the world using Citrix solutions to enable secure remote work. Find out more about how it works in this InternetRetailing white paper.
