At Taiwanese school, cloud-based services run five times faster

By SMBWorld Asia Editors | Dec 14, 2011

0 comments

 

 

 

Digg

 Email

Print

Thumbnail: 

National Taiwan University, one of Taiwan's oldest and most respected tertiary education institutions, has chosen Citrix's NetScaler solution to provide data security for its cutting-edge campus cloud network.

The deal sees National Taiwan University become the latest of a series of large universities and educational institutions across Greater China to choose Citrix in recent years.

In 2008, Shanghai's prestigious Jiaotong University chose Citrix's Server-Based Computing technology to provide central management and enable remote access. After the deployment, the university reported that the project had succeeded in enabling more users and more applications to access the university's network from more of the university's campuses.

Later, in 2009, Macau Polytechnic commissioned Citrix to deploy its flagship desktop virtualisation platform, XenDesktop, to enable 1,500 virtual desktops for 22 separate laboratories across four separate campuses.

Citrix has also been chosen for a string of IT projects carried out by other leading Greater China universities, including Sun Yat-Sen University, Chengdu University of Technology, and National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan.

"We're delighted that so many of Greater China's most respected seats of learning have turned to Citrix to fulfil their IT objectives," said Victor Tsao, general manager, Greater China, Citrix Systems.  "Not only does this underline the attractiveness of our value proposition, but it also frees up the universities' resources, which can instead be dedicated to their valuable contributions to academia. We hope this latest project will pave the way for other education sector projects in the future."

The National Taiwan University project arose when Taiwan's Ministry of Education launched its Information Security Management System (ISMS) Certification Programme in 2009. Under the programme, funding was made available to help Taiwanese universities to secure their networks and proprietary data, subject to certain conditions. One of these was that the security solution had to comply with ISO 27001, the international standard for information security management systems.

Citrix NetScaler boosts network performance considerably, making apps and cloud-based services run five times better by offloading app and database servers and accelerating app and service performance. Its integrated security features provide administrators granular application-level control, while providing users with remote access from anywhere.

Not only is it compliant with ISO 27001, in line with the university's requirements, but it also provides IT administrators with a single point to manage access control and limit actions within sessions based on both user identity and the endpoint device, for better application security, data protection, and compliance management. Deployed in front of web and database servers, NetScaler combines high-speed load balancing and content switching, data compression, content caching, SSL acceleration, network optimisation, application visibility and application security on a single, comprehensive platform.

"Developing a next-generation campus cloud network was a central part of our IT plans, and we wanted a technology vendor whose products could match our ambitions," said Prof. Yeali S. Sun, director of National Taiwan University's Computer and Information Networking Centre. "They took the time to become fully familiar with our requirements, then proposed a solution that met all of them. The project was delivered in three separate phases. Each was completed on schedule and within budget, and our network is now more secure than ever."