Understanding OpenCloud Access

One of the major areas of interest for any enterprise is to provide its employees and partners with seamless, on-demand access to applications. This is complicated by the fact that these applications can be running on various platforms and can exist within the enterprise, can be hosted with a service provider (IaaS), or can be offered as SaaS. The obvious need is for a solution with a single unified framework that offers a consistent view to securely control the entire life cycle of user accounts on these applications.

While offering secure access, a solution of this nature should offer a smooth end user experience by serving the applications on demand and by providing single sign-on to the application users. The solution should tie into existing enterprise infrastructure, making the implementation quick and easy. Citrix® NetScaler® appliances and the Citrix® OpenCloud Access® application come together to offer exactly such a solution.

OpenCloud Access integrates with NetScaler to deliver an Enterprise solution for single sign-on (SSO) and user-account management. It provides the ability to extend an enterprise identity to any Web application (internal or external), and offers seamless SSO to enterprise Web applications as well as Internet based SaaS applications. This solution also provides a central platform from which to perform user-account management.

The OpenCloud Access VM is a virtual appliance that runs on Citrix® XenServer®. Citrix® XenCenter®, Citrix® XenServer, and the OpenCloud Access image are essential components of the Setup process.

OpenCloud Access 1.2 VM provides many new features and resolution to few issues with OCA 1.1 VM. It captures all OpenCloud Access features released up to Service Pack 5. Thus with this single VM image you get equivalent to OCA 1.1 VM + Service Pack 5 (Including other Service Packs and Hot Fixes).

Key Features of the release are:

• Works with NetScaler VPX and MPX
• Works with NetScaler 9.2, 9.2.e and 9.3 software releases
• MyWebApps employee portal page
• 71 application SSO connectors
• 28 application Provisioning connectors
• Reduced setup time for key SSO use case
• Generic HTTP Formfill connector creator
• Generic SAML connector creator
• Two Factor authentication for portal page
• Single Sign-on application categories
• Linking applications to Active Directory
• Enhanced Active Directory synchronization

Download OpenCloud Access 1.2 here (require mycitrix id)