Business Readiness—The Key to Surviving and Thriving in Uncertain Times

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Business Readiness—The Key to
Surviving and Thriving in Uncertain
Times
Transcript of a discussion on how companies and communities alike are adjusting to a variety
of workplace threats using new ways of enabling enterprise-class access and distribution of vital
data resources and applications.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and
you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.
Just as the nature of risk has been a whirling dervish of late, the counterforces of
business continuity measures have had to turn on a dime as well. What used to mean
better batteries for servers and mirrored, distributed datacenters has recently evolved
into anywhere, any-circumstance solutions that keep workers working -- no matter what.
Out-of-the-blue workplace disruptions -- whether natural disasters, political unrest, or the
current coronavirus pandemic -- have shown how true business continuity means
enabling all employees to continue to work in a safe and secure manner.
Stay with us now as we explore how companies and communities alike are adjusting to
a variety of workplace threats using new ways of enabling enterprise-class access and
distribution of vital data resources and applications.
And in doing so, these public and private sector innovators are setting themselves up to
be more agile, intelligent, and responsive to their workers, customers, and citizens once
the disaster inevitably passes.
Here to share stories on making IT systems and people
evolve together to overcome workplace disruptions is
Chris McMasters, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the
City of Corona, California. Welcome, Chris.
Chris McMasters: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: We’re also here with Jordan Catling, Associate
Director of Client Technology at The University of
Sydney in Australia. Welcome, Jordan.
Jordan Catling: Thank you very much, Dana. I
appreciate the invite.McMasters

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Gardner: And we’re here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and
Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Welcome, Tim.
Tim Minahan: Thank you for including me, Dana.
Gardner: Tim, how has business readiness changed over the past few years? It seems
to be a moving target.
Stay prepared for any- and everything
Minahan: The very nature of business readiness is not about preparing for what’s
happening today -- or responding to a specific incident. It’s a signal for having a plan to
ensure that your work environment is ready for any situation.
That certainly means having in place the right policies and contingency plans, but it also
-- with today’s knowledge workforce -- goes to enabling a very flexible and dynamic
workspace infrastructure that allows you to scale up, scale down, and move your entire
workforce on a moment’s notice.
You need to ensure that your
employees can continue to work
safely and remotely while giving
your company the confidence that
they’re doing that all in a very
secure way, so the company’s
information and infrastructure
remains secure.
Gardner: Chris McMasters, as a CIO, you surely remember the days when IT systems
were brittle, not easily adjusted, and hard to change. Has the nature of work and these
business continuity challenges forced IT to be more agile?
McMasters: Yes, absolutely. There’s no better example than in government.
Government IT is known for being on-premises and very resistant to change. In the
current environment everything has been flipped on its head. We’re having to be flexible,
more dynamic in how we deploy services, and in how users get those services.
Gardner: Jordan, higher education hasn’t necessarily been the place where we’d expect
business continuity challenges to be overcome. But you’ve been dealing with an
aggressive outbreak of the coronavirus in China.
You need to ensure that your employees
can continue to work safely and remotely
while giving your company the confidence
that they’re doing that all in a very secure
way, so the company’s information and
infrastructure remains secure.

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Catling: It’s been a very interesting six months for us,
particularly in higher education, with the Australian fires,
floods, and now the coronavirus. But generally, as an
institution that operates over 22 locations, with teaching
hospitals and campuses -- our largest campus has its own
zip code -- this is part of our day, enabling people to work
from wherever they are.
The really interesting thing about this situation is we’re
having to enable teaching from places that we wouldn’t
ordinarily. We’re having to make better use of the tools that
we have available to come up with innovative solutions to
keep delivering a distinctive education that The University of
Sydney is known for.
Gardner: And when you’re trying to anticipate challenges, something like COVID-19, the
disease that emanates from the coronavirus, did you ever think that you’d have to
virtually overnight provide students stuck in one location with the opportunity to continue
to learn from a distance?
Catling: We need to always be preparing for a number of scenarios. We need to be able
to rapidly deploy solutions to enable people to work from wherever they are. The
flexibility and dynamic toolsets are really important for us to be able to scale up safely
and securely.
Gardner: Tim, the idea of business continuity including workers not only working at
home but perhaps in far-flung countries where they’ve been stuck because of a
quarantine, for example -- these haven’t always been what we consider IT business
continuity. Why is worker continuity more important than ever?
Minahan: Globally we’re recognizing the importance of
the overall employee experience and how it’s becoming
a key differentiator for companies and organizations. We
have a global shortage of medium- to high-skilled talent.
We’re short about 85 million workers.
So companies are battling for the high ground on
providing preferred ways to work. One way they do that
is ensuring that they can provide flexible work
environments, ones that rely on effective workplace
technologies that enable employees to do their very best
work wherever that might be. That might be in an office
building. It might be in a remote location, or in certain
situations they may need to turn on a dime and move
from their office to the home force to keep operations going. Companies are planning to
be flexible not just for business readiness but also for competitive advantage.
Catling
Minahan

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Gardner: Making this happen with enterprise-caliber, mission-critical reliability isn’t just a
matter of renting some new end-devices and throwing up a few hotspots. Why is this
about an end-to-end solution, and not just point solutions?
Be proactive rather than reactive
Minahan: One of the most important things to recognize is companies often first react
to a crisis environment. Currently, you’re hearing a lot of, “Hey, we just,” like the school
system in Miami, for example, “purchased 250,000 laptops to distribute to students and
teachers to maintain their education.”
However, that may enable and empower students and employees, but it may be less
associated with proper security measures and put both the companies’, workers’, and
customers’ personal information at risk.
You need to plan from the get-go for having a
very flexible, remote workplace infrastructure -
- one that embeds security. That way -- no
matter where the work needs to get done, no
matter on what device, or even on whatever
unfamiliar network -- you can be assured that
the appropriate security policies are in place to protect the private information of your
employees. The critical information of your business, and certainly any kinds of customer
or constituent information, is at stake.
Gardner: Let’s hear what you get when you do this right. Jordan at The University of
Sydney, you had more than 14,000 students unexpectedly quarantined in China, yet
they still needed to somehow do their coursework. Tell us how this came about, and
what you’ve done to accommodate them.
Maintain quality IT during quarantine
Catling: Exactly right. As this situation began to develop in late January, we quite
quickly began to scenario plan around the possible eventualities. A significant part of our
role, as the technologists within the university, is making sure that we’re providing a
toolset that can adapt to the needs of the community.
So we looked at various platforms that we were already using -- and some that we
hadn’t -- to work out what do. Within the academic community, we needed the best set
of tools for our staff to use in different and innovative ways. We quickly had to develop
solutions and had to lean on our partners to help us out with developing those.
Gardner: Did you know where your students were going to be housed? Was this a case
where you knew that they were going to be in a certain type of facility with certain types
Plan from the get-go for
having a very flexible, remote
workplace infrastructure – one
that embeds security.

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of resources or are they scattered around? How did you deal with that last mile issue, so
to speak?
Catling: The last mile issue is a real tricky one. We knew that people were going to be in
various locations throughout mainland China, and elsewhere. We needed to quickly
build a solution capable of supporting our students -- no matter where they were, no
matter what device that they were using, and no matter what their local Internet
connection was like.
We have had variability in the quality of our connections even within Australia. But now
we needed a solution that would cater to as many people as possible and be
considerate of quite a number of different scenarios that our students and staff would be
facing.
Gardner: How were you are able to provide that quality of service across so many
applications given that level of variability?
Catling: The biggest focus for us, of course, is the safety and security of our staff and
students. It’s paramount. We very quickly tried to work out where our people would be
connecting from and tried to make sure that the resources we were providing, the
connection to the resources, would be as close to them as possible to minimize the
impact of that last mile.
We worked with Citrix to put together a set of application delivery controllers into Hong
Kong to make sure that the access to the solution was nice and fast. Then we worked to
optimize the connection back from Hong Kong to Sydney to maximize the user
experience for our staff and students.
Gardner: So this has very much been a cloud-enabled solution. You couldn’t have really
done this eight or 10 years ago.
Catling: Certainly not this
quickly. Literally from putting a
call into Citrix, we worked from
design to a production
environment within seven days.
For me, that’s unheard of, really.
Regardless of whether it’s 10
years ago or 10 weeks ago, it
was quite a monumental effort.
It’s highlighted the importance of having partners that both seek to understand the
business problems you’re facing and coming up with innovative solutions rapidly and are
able to deploy those at scale. And cloud is obviously a really important part of that.
We are still delivering on this solution. We have the capabilities now that we didn’t have
a couple of months ago. We’re able to provide applications to students no matter where
they are. They’re able to continue their studies.
It highlights the importance of having
partners that both seek to understand the
business problems you’re facing and coming
up with innovative solutions rapidly and are
able to deploy those at scale. And cloud is
obviously a really important part of that.

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Obviously, the solution needs to remain flexible to the evolving needs. The situation is
changing frequently and we are discovering new needs and new requirements. As our
academics start to use the technology in different ways, we’re evolving the solution
based on their feedback to try and maximize the experience for both our staff and
students.
Gardner: Tim, when you hear Jordan describe this solution, does it strike you as a
harbinger of more business continuity things to come? How has the coronavirus issue --
and not just China but in Europe and in North America -- reinforced your idea of what a
workplace-enhanced business continuity solution should be?
Business continuity in crisis and beyond
Minahan: We continue to field a rising a number of inquiries from customers and other
companies. They are trying to assess the best ways to ensure continuity of their
business operations and switch to a remote workforce in a very short period of time.
Situations like this remind us that we need to be planning today for any kind of business-
ready situation. Using these technologies ensures that you can quickly adapt your work
models, moving entire employee groups from an office to a remote environment, if
needed, whether it’s because of virus, flood, or any other unplanned event.
What’s exciting for me is being able to use such agile work models and digital
workspace technology to arm companies with new sources for growth and competitive
advantage.
One good example is we recently partnered with the Center for Economics and Business
Research to examine the impact remote work models and technologies have on
business and economic growth. We found that 69 percent of people who are currently
unemployed or economically inactive would be willing to start working if given the
opportunity to work flexibly by having the right technology.
They further estimate that
activating these, if you will,
untapped pools of talent by
enabling these flexible work-from-
home models -- especially for
parents, workers in rural areas,
retirees, part-time, and gig
workers, folks that are normally
outside of the traditional work pool
and reactivating them through digital workspace technologies -- could drive upward of an
initial $2 trillion in economic gains across the US economy. So, the investment in
readiness that folks are making is now being applied to drive ongoing business results
even in non-crisis times.
Activating … untapped pools of talent by
enabling these flexible work-from-home
models … and reactivating them through
digital workspace technologies could
drive upward of an initial $2 trillion in
economic gains across the US economy.

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Gardner: The coronavirus has certainly been leading the headlines recently, but it
wasn’t that long ago that we had other striking headlines.
In California last fall, Chris McMasters, the wildfires proved a recurring problem. Tell us
about Corona and why adjusting to a very dangerous environment -- but requiring your
key employees to continue to work – allowed you to adjust to a major business continuity
challenge.
Fighting fire with the cloud
McMasters: Corona is like a lot of local governments within the United States. I came
from the private sector and have been in the city IT for about four years now. When I first
got there, everything was on-premises. Our back-up with literally three miles away on
the other side of the freeway.
If there was a disaster and something totaled the city, literally all of our technology
assets would be down, which concerned me. I used to work for a national company and
we had offices all over and we backed up across the country. So this was a much
different environment. Yet we were dealing with public safety, which with police and fire
service, 911 service, and they can never go down. Citizens depend on all of that.
That was a wake-up call for me. At that time, we didn’t really have any virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) going on. We did have server virtualization, but nothing in the cloud.
In the government sector, we have a lot of regulation that revolves around the cloud and
its security, especially when we are dealing with police and fire types of information. We
have to be very careful. There are requirements both from the State of California and the
federal government that we have to comply with.
At first, we used a government cloud, which was a
little bit slower in terms of innovation because of all
the regulations. But that was a first step to
understanding what was ahead for us. We started
this process about two years ago. At the time, we
felt like we needed to push more of our assets to
the cloud to give us more continuity.
At the end of the day, we realized we also needed to get the desktops up there, too.
Using VDI and the cloud, and at the time, no one was doing that. But we went and talked
to Citrix. We flew out to their headquarters, sat with their people, and discussed our
initiative, what we are trying to accomplish, and how that would extend out to support our
environment for public safety. And that means all of the people out at the edge who
actually touch citizens and provide emergency support services.
That was the beginning of the journey and Citrix has been there since day-one. They
develop the products around that particular idea for us right up to today.
We … needed to push more
of our assets to the cloud to
give us more continuity …
and to support our
environment for public safety.

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In the last two years, we’ve had quite a few fires in the State of California. Corona butts
right up against the forest line and so we have had a lot of damage done by fires, both in
our city and in the surrounding county. And there have been the impacts that occur after
fires, too, which include mudslides. We get the whole gamut of that stuff.
But now we find that those first responders have the data to take action. We get the data
into their hands quickly, make sure it’s secure on the way there, and we make that
continuative so that it never fails. Those are the last people that we want to have fail.
We’ve been able to utilize this type of a platform where our data currently resides in two
different datacenters in two different states. It’s on encrypted arrays at rest.
We are operating on a software-defined network so we can look at security from a
completely different perspective. The old way was, “Let’s build a moat around it and a
big wall, and hopefully no one gets in.” Now, instead we look at it quite differently. Our
assets are protected outside of our facilities.
Those personnel riding in fire engines,
in police cars, right up at the edge --
they have to be secure right up to that
edge. We have to maintain and
understand the identity of that person.
We need to know what applications
they are accessing, or should not be accessing, and be secure all along that path.
This has all changed our outlook on how we deal with things and what a modern-day
work environment looks like. The money we use comes from taxes, the people pay, and
we provide services for our citizens. The interesting thing about that is we’re now driving
toward the idea of government on-demand.
Before, when you would come home, right after a hard day’s work, city hall would be
closed. Government was open 8 to 5, when people are normally working. So, when you
want to conduct business at city hall, you have to take some time off of work. You try to
find one day of the week, or a time when you might sneak in there to get your permits for
something and proceed with your business.
But our new idea is different. Most of our services can be provided online for people. If
we can do that, that’s fantastic, right? So, you can come home and say, “Hey, you know
what? I was thinking about building an addition to my house.” So you go online, file your
permits, and submit all of your documents electronically to us.
The difference that VDI provides for our employees is that I can now tap into a workforce
of let’s say, a single mother who has a special needs child who can’t work normal hours,
but she can work at night. So that person can take that permit, look at that permit at 6 or
7 pm, process the permit, and then at 5 am the next day, that process is done. You wake
Those personnel riding in fire
engines, in police cars, right up at
the edge – they have to be secure
right up to that edge.

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up in the morning, your permit has been processed by the city and completed. That type
of flexibility is integral for us to make government more effective for people.
It’s not the necessarily the public safety support, which we are concerned about. But it’s
about also generally providing flexible services for people and making sure government
continues to operate.
Gardner: Tim, it’s interesting that by addressing business continuity issues and
disasters we are able to move very rapidly to a government on-demand or higher
education on-demand. So, what are some of the larger goals when it comes to workforce
agility?
Flexibility extends the way business works
Minahan: The examples that Chris and Jordan just gave are what excites me about
flexible work models, empowered by digital workplace technologies, and the ability to
embrace entirely new business models.
I used the example from the Center of Economic Business Research and how to tap into
untapped talent pools. Another example of a company using similar technology is eBay.
So eBay, like many of their competitors, would build a big call center and hire a bunch of
people, train them up, and then one of the competitors will build a call center down the
street and steal them away. They would have rapid turnover. They finally said, “Enough
is enough, we have to think of a different model.”
Well, they used the same approach of providing a secure digital workspace to reach into
new talent pools outside of big cities. They could now hire gig workers, stay-at-home
parents, etc., and re-engage them in the workforce by using the workplace platform to
arm them at the edge and provide a service that was formally only provided in a big work
hub, a big call center.
They went from having zero home force
workers to 600 by the end of last year,
and they are on a path to 4,000 by the
end of this year. eBay solved a big
problem, which is providing support for
customers. How do I have a call center
in a very competitive market? Well, I turn the tables and create new pools of talent, using
technology in an entirely different way.
Gardner: Jordan, now that you’ve had help from organizations like Citrix to deal with
your tough issue of students stuck in China, or other areas where there’s a quarantine,
are you going to take that innovation and use it in other ways? Is this a gift that keeps
giving?
eBay solved a big problem, which is
providing support for customers … by
creating new pools of talent, using
technology in an entirely different way.

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Catling: It’s a really interesting question. What it’s demonstrated to me is that, as
technologists, we need to be working with all of our people across the organization to
understand their needs and to provide the right tools, but not necessarily to be
prescriptive in how they are used. This current coronavirus situation has demonstrated
to us that a combination of just a few tools -- for example, the Citrix platform, Zoom,
Echo, and Canvas -- means a very different thing to one person than to another person.
There’s such large variability in the way that education is delivered across the university,
across so many disciplines, that it becomes about providing a flexible set of tools that all
of our people can use in different and exciting ways. That extends not only to the current
situation but to more normal times.
If we can provide the right toolset that’s flexible and meets the users where they are, and
also make sure that the solutions provide a natural experience, that’s when you are
really geared up well for success. The technology kind of fades into the background and
becomes a true enabler of the bright minds across the institution.
Gardner: Chris, now that you’re able to do more with virtual desktops and delivering
data regardless of the circumstances to your critical workers as well as to your citizens,
what’s the next step?
Can you add a layer of intelligence rather than just being about better feeds and
speeds? What comes next, and how would Citrix help you with that?
Intelligence improves government operations
McMasters: We’re neck deep in data analytics and in trying to understand how we can
make impacts correctly by analyzing data. So adding artificial intelligence (AI) on top of
those layers, understanding utilization of our resources, is the amazing part of where
we’re going.
There’s so much unused hardware and
processing power tied up in our normal
desktop machines. Being able to
disrupt that and flip it up on its end is a
fundamental change in how
government operates. This is literally
turning it on-end. I mean, AI can impact
all the way down to how we do helpdesk, how it minimizes our response times and
turnaround times, to increased productivity, and in how we service 160,000 people in my
city. All of that changes.
Already I’m saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by using the cloud and VDI models
and at the same time increasing all my service levels across the board. And now we can
add this layer of business continuity to it, and that’s before we start benefitting from
predictive AI and using data to determine asset utilization.
AI can impact all the way down to how
we do helpdesk, how it minimizes our
response times and turnaround times,
to increased productivity, and in how
we service 160,000 people in my city.

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Moving from a CAPEX model to this OPEX model for government is something very
new, it’s something that public sector or a private sector has definitely capitalized on and
I think public sector is ripe for doing that. So for us, it’s changing everything, including
our budget, how we deliver services, how we do helpdesk support, and on to the ways
that we’re assessing our assets and leveraging citizens’ tax dollars correctly.
Gardner: Tim, organizations, both public and private sector, get involved with these
intelligent workspaces in a variety of ways. Sometimes it might be a critical issue such
as business continuity or a pandemic.
But ultimately, as Chris just mentioned, this is about digital business transformation. How
are you able to take whatever on-ramp organizations are getting into an intelligent
workspace and then give them more reasons to see ongoing productivity? How is this
something that has a snowball effect on productivity?
AI, ML work with you, not instead of you
Minahan: Chris hit the nail on the head. Certainly, the initial on-ramps to digital
workspace provides employees with unified and secure access to everything they need
to be productive and in one experience. That means all of their apps, all of their content,
regardless of where that’s stored, regardless of what device they’re accessing it from
and regardless of where they’re accessing it from.
However, it gets really exciting when you go beyond that foundation of unified
experience in a secure environment toward infusing things like machine learning (ML),
digital assistants, and bots to change the way that people work. They can newly extract
out some of the key insights and tasks that they need to do and offer them up to
employees in real-time in a very personalized way. Then they can quickly take care of
those tasks and the things they need to remove that noise from their day, and even
guide them toward the right next steps to take to be even more productive, more
engaged, and do much more innovative and creative work.
So, absolutely, AI and ML and the
rise of bots are the next phase of
all of this, where it’s not just a place
you go to launch apps and work
securely, but a place where you go
to get your very best work done.
Gardner: Jordan, you were very impressively able to get more than 14,000 students to
continue their education regardless of what Mother Nature threw at them. And you were
able to do it in seven days. For those organizations that don’t want to be caught under
such circumstances, that want to become proactive and prepared, what lessons have
you have learned in your most recent journey that you can share with them? How can
they be better positioned to combat any unfortunate circumstances they might face?
AI and ML and the rise of bots are the
next phase … where it’s not just a
place you go to launch apps and work
securely, but a place where you go to
get your very best work done.

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Prioritize when, how, and with whom you work
Catling: It’s almost becoming cliché to say, but work is something that you do -- it’s not
a place anymore. So when we’re looking at and assessing tools for how we support the
university, we’re focusing on taking a cloud-first approach where it doesn’t matter where
a student or staff member is. They have access to all the resources they need on-
demand. That’s one of the real guiding principles we should be using in our decision-
making process.
Scalability is also a very important thing to us. The nature of the way that education is
delivered today with an on-campus model is that demand is very peaky. We need to be
mindful of how scalable and rapidly scalable a solution can be. That’s important to
consider, particularly in the higher education context. How quickly can you scale up and
down your environments to meet varying demands?
Also, it’s important to consider the number of flexible ways that each of the technology
products you choose can be used. For example, with the Citrix platform we can use it in
many different ways. It’s not only for us to provide applications out to students to
complete their coursework. It can also be used for providing secure access to data and
to workspaces. There are so many different ways it can be extended, and that’s a real
important thing when deciding which platform to use.
The final really important
takeaway for us has been the
establishment of true
partnerships. We’ve had
extremely good support from
our partners, such as Citrix
and Zoom, where they very
rapidly sought to understand
and work with us to solve the unique business problems that we’re facing. The real, true
partnership is not one of just providing products, but of really sitting down shoulder-to-
shoulder, trying to understand, but also suggesting ways to use a technology we may
not be thinking of -- or maybe it’s never been done before.
As Chris mentioned earlier, virtual desktops in the cloud weren’t a big thing that many
years ago. About a decade ago, we began working with Citrix to provide streams of
desktops to physical devices across campus.
That was something -- that was a very unusual use of technology. So I think that the
partnership is very important and something that organizations should develop and be
ready to use. It goes in both directions at all times.
The real, true partnership is not one of just
providing products, but of really sitting down
shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to understand,
but also suggesting ways to use a
technology we may not be thinking of -- or
maybe it’s never been done before.

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Gardner: Chris, now that you have, unfortunately, dealt with these last few harsh wildfire
seasons in Southern California, what lessons have you learned? How do you make
yourselves more like local government on demand?
Public-private sector partnerships a plus
McMasters: That’s a big question. For us, we looked at breaking some of the
paradigms that exist in government. They don’t have the same impetus to change as in
the private sector. They are less willing to take risks. However, there are ways to work
with vendors and partners to mitigate a lot of that risk, ways to pilot and test cutting-edge
technologies that don’t put you at risk as you push these things out.
There are very few vendors that I would consider such partners. I probably can count
them on one hand in total, and the interesting thing is that when we were selecting a
vendor for this particular project, we were looking for a true partner. In our case, it was
Citrix and Microsoft who came to the table. And when I look back at what’s happened in
our relationship with those two in particular, I couldn’t ask for anything better.
We have literally had
technicians, engineers,
everyone on-site, on the phone
every step of the way as we
have been developing this.
They took a lot of the risk out
for us, because we are dealing with public dollars and we need to make sure these
projects work. To have that level of comfort and stability in the background and knowing
that I can rely on these people was huge. It’s what allowed us to develop to where we
are today, which is far advanced in the government world.
That’s where things have to change. This kind of public-private partnership is what the
public sector needs to start maturing. It’s bidirectional; it goes both ways. There is a lot
of information that we offer to them; there is a lot of things they do for us. And so it goes
back and forth as we develop this through this product cycle. It’s advantageous for both
of us to be in it.
That’s where sometimes, especially in the public sector, we lose focus. They don’t
understand what the private sector wants and what they are moving toward. It’s about
being aligned on both sides of that equation -- and it benefits both parties.
Technology is going to change, and it just keeps driving faster. There’s always another
thing around the corner, but building these types of partnerships with vendors and
understanding what they want helps them understand what you want, and then be able
to deliver.
Gardner: Tim, how should businesses better work with vendor organizations to prepare
themselves and their workers for a flexible future?
[The partnerships are] what allowed us to
develop to where we are today, which is far
advanced in the government world.

of 15
Minahan: First off, I would echo Chris’s comments. We all want government on-
demand. You need a solution like that. But how they should work together? There are
two great examples here in The University of Sydney and the City of Corona.
It really starts by listening. What are the
problems we are trying to solve in planning for
the future? How do we create a digitally agile
organization and infrastructure that allows us
to pursue new business opportunities, and just
as easily ensure business continuity? So start by listening, map out a joint roadmap
together and innovate toward that.
We are collectively as an industry constantly looking to innovate, constantly looking to
leverage new technologies to drive business outcomes -- whether those are for our
citizens, students, or clientele. Start by listening, doing joint and co-development work,
and constantly sharing that innovation with the rest of the market. It raises all boats.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on how business continuity measures have evolved on a dime
to meet serious new challenges. And we have learned how true business continuity
means enabling all employees to always work in a safe secure manner no matter where
they find themselves or why. When you do this right, it is the gift that keeps giving and
allows for many more digital transformation benefits to unfold.
So a big thank you to our guests, Chris McMasters, CIO at City of Corona, California.
Thank you so much, Chris.
McMasters: Thank you.
Gardner: We have also been here with Jordan Catling, Associate Director of Client
Technology at The University of Sydney in Australia. Thank you so much, Jordan.
Catling: Thank you.
Gardner: And thank you so much, Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy
and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix.
Minahan: Thanks, Dana! Always a pleasure.
Gardner: And a big thank you lastly to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect
Business Continuity Innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect
discussions.
Thanks again for listening, please pass this along to your business associates, and do
come back next time.
Start by listening, map out
a joint roadmap together
and innovate toward that.

of 15
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.
Transcript of a discussion on how companies and communities alike are adjusting to a variety
of workplace threats using new ways of enabling enterprise-class access and distribution of vital
data resources and applications. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights
reserved.
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