Why Cyber Teams Are Looking Beyond Citrix for Securing Remote Work
For over 20 years, Citrix has been the go-to name for organizations that need employees to access corporate applications remotely. For many, it was the only name on the list. But that’s beginning to change.
Security teams across a number of industries are now starting to ask questions and wonder whether or not Citrix is still the best fit for the job, and the reasons why go beyond just concerns around licensing costs.
The Complexity Problem
Most Citrix environments are quite complex. They have a wide range of products and dependencies (license servers, StoreFront, ADC, and Virtual Delivery Agents), making it extremely difficult for IT teams to maintain security. Platforms are intricate, and each component needs to be patched, configured, and monitored on a regular basis.
This complexity doesn’t just create extra work for IT teams. It has real security consequences that impact businesses. To give a couple of examples, several Citrix CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) hit the headlines in 2024 and 2025, including those related to Session Recording and NetScaler.
This led to Citrix being listed on government agency websites, such as CISA, with remediation advice for anyone running the software.
These weren’t exotic zero-day vulnerabilities exploited by a professional hacking group, mind you. They’re the kind of issues that crop up when platforms become overly complex and have too many moving parts. For lean security teams running a Citrix environment, this presents the uncomfortable dilemma of needing to choose between depth of coverage and breadth of monitoring.
BYOD Changed the Equation
When Citrix built the core infrastructure of its product, the company did so on the assumption that most users would be connected from managed devices using corporate infrastructure. This may have made sense at the time, but nowadays, BYOD (bring your own device) policies have gone from a rare perk to a baseline expectation in many industries, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Contractors, off-shore teams, seasonal workers and even full-time remote employees all use personal laptops regularly. This is especially true in industries where workforces tend to be scaled quickly, such as customer support and outsourcing.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) was never built for this kind of environment. It creates a lot of critical issues with remote workers using these systems, such as latency, support overheads, and a genuinely frustrating user experience. This leads to a whole host of shadow IT problems because people find workarounds for the tools they have been given.
Where Remote Connectivity Is Headed
Because of these concerns, there has been an uptick in curiosity around Citrix alternatives over the last few years. So much so that there are now a number of viable possible substitutes on the market, such as SASE solutions that protect traffic at the network level, enterprise browsers that isolate web-based work, and Unified Endpoint Managements (UEMs) that look to manage all devices/endpoints within a company.
Each of these solutions has its own plus points, but they do come with limitations. SASE protects the network but not what’s on the device. Enterprise browsers only cover browser-based work, leaving desktop applications exposed. And UEM presumes you can manage the whole device, which isn’t the case once a contractor comes in with a personal laptop.
In light of this, one approach that has gained particular traction is the secure enclave model. These solutions create a secure, encrypted workspace on the device itself, where company data and applications are accessible but kept separate from anything personal on that same machine. Because applications within the enclave run locally, there are no latency issues. And because there’s no backend infrastructure to manage, setup time is minimal.
This works around a problem that has always plagued VDI approaches: privacy. The secure workspace exists separately from the user’s personal activity, so they’re not handing their personal laptop over to corporate IT. That matters especially when the IT team is facing the task of provisioning 200 contractor seats in a single week.
These solutions make BYOD policies easier to roll out, but also easier to adopt, since they reduce friction among the very people expected to enforce these standards.
The Cost Conversation Is Changing Too
Citrix licensing is a notoriously complex beast with a total cost that extends beyond the software itself.
The full cost of Citrix involves infrastructure, SQL backends, ADC, load balancing, high availability, and often specialized staff to manage and maintain it and keep it all running. For organizations without in-house Citrix skills, it is getting harder to justify the total cost of ownership against alternatives that require no backend infrastructure.
There are also “hidden” costs to consider. Organizations tend not to realize until too late that deploying a Citrix environment often means ongoing costs for specialist consultants, onboarding new users, and help desk calls for problems caused by complex VDI.
These are easy to overlook until you deploy the software and run the full numbers later down the line.
What Security Leaders Should Be Weighing
If your team is evaluating a move away from Citrix, there are three questions that matter most. First, there’s the question of what you’re actually trying to secure. If your remote workforce is using a handful of apps on personal devices, chances are you don’t need full VDI to protect them.
Then there’s the question of usability. Security solutions that frustrate users tend to get circumvented, and going around a security solution introduces a security problem.
Finally, there’s cost. Once you factor in infrastructure, support, and onboarding time, the sticker price tells a very incomplete story.
The importance of remote work security is here to stay, and while the solutions of 2015 might have once been cutting-edge, they are not necessarily the right fit for 2026.
Although Citrix has a role to play, the conversation has evolved. For a growing number of organizations, the answer is at the device level, allowing work to be done locally and getting out of the way.
