Citrix products are set to support multi-factor authentication and facial recognition, instead of just relying on the age-old username and password combination.

Speaking at Citrix Synergy 2018 in California, senior company executives explained the company will support alternative ways of confirming users’ identities in a bid to boost security and improve the user experience.

Addressing reporters at a press Q&A following the keynote address along with CEO David Henshall, , chief product officer PJ Hough said Citrix was adding “full support for multi-factor authentication in the platform and the Workspace“.

“We are broadly deployed in a number of industries including healthcare, where log-in techniques such as badge swipe, etc, are already dominant as the log-in mechanisms, so the workspace will support all of those as capabilities,” he said.

But he conceded that the widespread implementation of such alternatives is rather “future-oriented” – in light of the fact many devices lack the hardware capability, despite outlining that everything announced in the keynote address was either available now, or would be within the next 90 days.

“One of the reasons why we can’t actually broadly deliver facial recognition technology is not because we haven’t implemented the software part of it, it’s that the devices aren’t broadly deployed that are necessary to support it; whether it’s encryption capabilities or high-quality facial recognition that doesn’t get fooled by holding up a picture of me in front of it.”

While the iPhone X does boast this capabilty, its status as an expensive, high-end smartphone means it likely hasn’t found much adoption within businesses.

He added: “We continue to evolve those technologies, but we are part of a broader ecosystem and we need the ecosystem partners here to continue to invest. I think part of the opportunity for us is we want to inspire the ecosystem.”

CTO Christian Reilly demonstrated a login using facial recognition during his keynote address, in which he said “usernames and passwords are not great security”. 

Expanding on the vulnerability of passwords, Sridhar Mullapudi, VP of product management for Workspace services, told IT Pro the widespread use of passwords makes it more likely to suffer a security risk, and that they were “an old way of doing things”. Plenty of recent data breaches have involved the threat of credential re-use, where, for example, a hack of LinkedIn password information has forced other companies to reset customers’ login details.

“As part of the Citrix Workspace we are building, identity and access management is a key part,” he said. “As part of that we have solutions; we built multi-factor authentication, and that could be facial recognition or thumbprint, or any other factor that you use to log-in, like two-factor authentication (2FA) – that’s built into the Workspace itself.”

He added: “If users have to remember passwords, and create passwords across multiple applications, it is not the most secure way – because users are not the best in … making passwords across everything, so you want to be able to provide them with a secure single sign-on across the applications.”

Citrix’s decision to strengthen security comes as part of a wider industry movement away from passwords. Microsoft ditched conventional passwords altogether in a test run for Windows 10 S earlier this year, opting instead for alternative options such as facial recognition, fingerprint, and FIDO keys.

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Citrix CEO David Henshall wants his company to focus on three key areas; unifying the portfolio, accelerating to the cloud, and expanding into new technologies.

In his opening keynote address at Synergy 2018 in California, Henshall outlined his future plans for the virtualisation firm, centred around the theme of “people-centric computing” where technology delivers everything users need in a simple and accessible way.

Key to Henshall’s vision is the ‘universal workspace’ – embodied in the Workplace App, Citrix’s latest innovation – which aims to reduce complexity, and raise productivity by enabling universal access to apps.

Also integral to delivering its wider vision is the rollout of Citrix Analytics, a security platform initially announced last year, with chief product officer PJ Hough walking the audience through its potential.

“This is not another dashboard, this is not another alerting system; this is an autonomous closed-loop security platform that will deliver more productivity and security to your organisations,” Hough claimed.

Using a mass of data points, Citrix Analytics builds profiles for individual users, allowing an autonomous machine learning-powered system to analyse potential security risks in real-time, without causing any disruption to day-to-day workflows or productivity.

“We’ve essentially distributed risk out of the enterprise; we’re pushing it to the user, we’re pushing to the device, we’re pushing it the network and beyond,” Henshall said, adding that traditional cybersecurity defences are struggling to keep pace with the range of modern threats.

“[Old tactics are] too cumbersome. They’re too expensive. Cyber threats as we know it are only going to get more complex as we move forward, and only going to get more sophisticated, so that’s why we’re very much focused on a security model that’s we think is future-proof. The challenge is of course balancing these competing needs – the need for security with the potential impact on productivity,” he continued.

Announcing the “broad availability” of the Citrix Analytics platform, Hough said everything announced during the keynote is available either now, or will be within 90 days.

Speaking at a press Q&A following the keynote address, Hough went into more detail around building a better user experience for Citrix customers.

“Having spent a lot of time working on productivity software before I joined Citrix, I understand the value of reducing clicks, of reducing confusion for users, and really having people have a consistent and seamless experience across all their devices and platforms,” said Hough.

The keynote address also saw the firm make a slew of additional announcements tying into the idea of taking a holistic approach toward transforming the digital workspace.

These included an SD-WAN service for MSPs, an Intelligent Traffic Management tool based on its recent Cedexis acquisition, and, although the address was generally light on the Internet of Things (IoT), Amazon Alexa for business.

Dimension Data and Cisco have teamed up to expand their joint Connected Conservation project – a scheme designed to help protect elephants and rhinos from poachers – into Zambia, Kenya and Mozambique.

The solution works not by attaching trackers or sensors to the animals themselves, but by tracking activity in game reserves in the countries, analysing human activity via thermal cameras mounted on radio masts to transmit data back to operatives, CCTV analytics monitoring fishermen and boats on the lake, plus outdoor Wi-Fi so data can be shared in real time.

“Many organisations have committed to protecting animals through various reactive initiatives, such as dehorning, or inserting sensors in the horn and under the subcutaneous layer of skin. However, the problem with reactive initiatives is that by the time the reserve rangers reach the animal, it has been killed and the rhino horn or elephant tusks have been hacked off,” said Bruce Watson, Dimension Data Group Executive.

“With the Connected Conservation model, the technology is designed to proactively protect the land against humans. The animals are not touched, and are left to roam freely while a ‘layered’ effect of sophisticated technology, people and gadgets protect them.”

A control room is also being built for Zambia’s special marine unit with the sole responsibility of monitoring the data being fed back to it from the various source points. The Zambian local authorities will also work with local fishermen to hand out fishing permits, making it a more regulated industry than it currently is.

“More than ever before, technology has given us the ability to change the world – not tomorrow, not someday, but now,” added Karen Walker, Cisco senior vice president and chief marketing officer.

“We’re dedicated to making a difference by connecting the world and protecting the oldest and most vulnerable animals with some of the newest connectivity technology.”

Open source giant Red Hat has announced a series of industry partnerships that aim to make it easier for companies to develop container-based applications.

The first of these is a strategic deal with IBM that will see the companies combine their portfolios to offer new hybrid cloud services to their customers.

The agreement, announced at Red Hat’s annual Summit this week, means it’s now possible for customers of both companies to build and deploy applications using IBM’s Cloud service supported by Red Hat’s OpenShift Container platform. IBM’s WebSphere, DB2 and MQ software products will now be repackaged as certified containers on OpenShift.

It’s yet another deal struck in an ongoing partnership between the companies after a recent commitment by IBM to re-engineer its portfolio of software products to run using the increasingly popular container deployment.

A similar deal announced at the Summit will also see the creation of the industry’s first jointly managed container platform using Red Hat’s OpenShift software on Microsoft’s Azure environment, which includes access to Azure SQL DB and Azure Machine Learning. This builds upon a previous commitment signed in 2015 to bring more Red Hat products to Microsoft’s Azure platforms.

The aim of both agreements is to provide businesses with greater mobility when it comes to application deployment. An alternative to virtual machines, containers provide a means of bundling an application with all its software dependencies into a single package, bypassing the problem of incompatible environments when moving applications to different stages of testing or deployment.

IBM’s shift to containerisation will see its Cloud Private and Cloud Private for Data platforms, as well as a number of middleware products, become Red Hat-certified containers.

A joint consultancy unit will be set up linking both IBM Garage and Red Hat Consulting, which will support those customers either wishing to test out the combined service or looking to move their existing application investments to a hybrid model.

Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of IBM Hybrid Cloud, said that the move would provide “more choice and flexibility” to customers looking to move towards containered applications.

“Our common vision for hybrid cloud using container architectures allows millions of enterprises – from banks, to airlines, to government organizations – to access leading technology from both companies without having to choose between public and private cloud,” Krishna said.

By combining services, Red Hat customers will now be able to exploit well established cloud-based artificial intelligence, IoT, and blockchain tools provided by IBM.

As for the Microsoft partnership, Red Hat claims customers will be provided with a consistent experience throughout the development lifecycle of an application, including support for OpenShift on Microsoft’s on-premise platform Azure Stack, through to deployment in a hybrid cloud.

Visual Studio subscribers will also get Red Hat Linux credits for the first time, allowing developers to work from a single platform regardless of the open source framework they choose.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group, said: “Today, we’re combining both companies’ leadership in Kubernetes, hybrid cloud and enterprise operating systems to simplify the complex process of container management, with an industry-first solution on Azure.”

In a separate but related announcement this week, IBM also said its PowerAI platform, a suite of deep learning frameworks, will also be available through Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Those organisations with eligible subscriptions can access their Red Hat OpenShift Container accounts on IBM’s Cloud platform using the Red Hat Cloud Access tool.

The joint Azure and OpenShift service is currently in a preview state, and will eventually be rolled out on a region by region basis.

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Microsoft yesterday set out to open up its cloud platform to developers hoping to build AI applications, revealing a host of machine learning initiatives at its annual Build conference.

Redmond wants its Azure cloud to be the backbone of developers’ AI innovations, with CEO Satya Nadella saying: “The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us. These advancements create incredible developer opportunity and also come with a responsibility to ensure the technology we build is trusted and benefits all.”

Project Kinect for Azure,is a package of sensors, including its next-generation depth camera, with onboard compute designed to allow local devices to benefit from AI capabilities.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Speech Devices SDK aims to enable developers to build a variety of voice-enabled scenarios like drive-through ordering systems, in-car or in-home assistants, smart speakers, and other digital assistants.

The tech giant also previewed its Project Brainwave, an architecture for deep neural net processing that Nadella said “will make Azure the fastest cloud for AI”. This is now available on Azure and for edge computing, and is fully integrated with Azure Machine Learning with support for Intel FPGA hardware and ResNet50-based neural networks.

The firm is also open sourcing the Azure IoT Edge Runtime, allowing customers to modify, debug and have more transparency and control over edge applications.

Azure IoT Edge also runs Custom Vision technology, a new service that Microsoft says enables devices such as drones and industrial equipment to work without cloud connectivity. This is the first Azure Cognitive Service to support edge deployment, with more coming to Azure IoT Edge over the next several months, according to the vendor.

“With over 30 cognitive APIs we enable scenarios such as text to speech, speech to text, and speech recognition, and our Cognitive Services are the only AI services that let you custom-train these AI capabilities across all your scenarios,” said Nadella.

Also announced was a new SDK for Windows 10 PCs in partnership with drone company DJI. Using Azure cloud, the SDK brings real-time data transfer capabilities to nearly 700 million Windows 10 devices. As part of the commercial partnership, DJI and Microsoft will co-develop tools leveraging Azure IoT Edge and Microsoft’s AI services to make drones available for agriculture, construction, public safety and other verticals.

Nadella also announced the company’s new AI for Accessibility, a $25 million, five-year programme aimed at using AI to help more than one billion people around the world who have disabilities.

The programme consists of grants, technology investments and expertise, and will also incorporate AI for Accessibility innovations into Microsoft Cloud services. Microsoft said that the initiative is similar to its previous AI for Earth scheme.

Intelligent apps

Microsoft also handed developers the ability to introduce more customisation for Microsoft 365 applications, so organisations can tailor them to their needs.

Developers whose businesses use the Microsoft 365 bundle of Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility and Security can now benefit from wider integrations in collaboration app Microsoft Teams, and even publish custom apps on the Teams app store.

There is also deeper SharePoint integration within Microsoft Teams to enable people to pin a SharePoint page directly into channels to promote deeper collaboration. Developers can use modern script-based frameworks like React within their projects to add more pieces that can be organised within SharePoint pages.

The vendor also revealed new Azure Machine Learning and JavaScript custom functions that let developers and organisations create their own additions to the Excel catalogue of formulas.