Just over a year ago I left Citrix to make it big with an innovative startup. Today, I’m delighted to be heading up the product group for a small company called Veridium, but I’m equally as delighted to be going back to Anaheim next week to see some of the friends I left behind at Citrix, no doubt to share a beer (or three) into the night.
While I enjoyed working at Citrix, I recall a consistent problem I had there – the password policy. Every 40 days I would be instructed to change my password. I was always reluctant to change my password because I knew there would be problems after. With multiple devices, email, and web apps with cached passwords it was inevitable I would get locked out of one of my accounts within hours of changing my password.
The password reset, expiration, and lockout situation used to bug the hell out of me. I would have to phone the help desk, spend 30 minutes going through my employee number, name, line manager, username, etc. It was so frustrating, especially in the situations where I would get locked out again within 10 minutes of hanging up with the help desk.
Even more ridiculous, I never really changed my password in all my years at Citrix, I just increased the number at the end of the password by one number each time. In hindsight, although convenient for me, it wasn’t a particularly secure policy I had set for myself – especially from my employers’ perspective, considering the data breaches we have seen every year over the last decade. But all of that was about to change.
You see, during my days at Citrix, I gained a reputation as an Apple fanboy. You name it I had the device. But looking back, the game changer from Apple was the introduction of Touch ID.
TouchID transformed my life. It meant I could get rid of the four-digit PIN to unlock my phone and use a more secure 10 digit PIN because I wouldn’t have to remember it every single time I used my phone (which is about every 2 mins of the day). Then Apple allowed application developers to leverage Touch ID. Wow, now I could use my fingerprint to unlock secure applications, like my banking, PayPal and any other app which required the dreaded password.
What I do know is that the first and last device I use every single day is my phone. I never leave home without it, even though I have progressed to the iPhoneX with Face ID (which isn’t, in my honest opinion, as good as Touch ID). There is so much I can do on my phone from a business and personal perspective and I never have to remember a single password since biometrics are built into the device for authentication.
Then I transitioned to Veridium and I thought “Citrix technology was cool, but these guys take it to another level.” At Veridium, we bring convenience and security together in a seamless user experience to finally do away with the pain that is passwords.
If I use my biometrics to unlock my phone and the mobile apps on the phone, wouldn’t it be amazing if I could extend that same capability beyond the boundary of the phone? What if, when I go to log into my Citrix environment, instead of typing in my password, I can use my fingerprint or my face to authenticate, using technology built right into my phone?
At Veridium, that’s exactly what we have created, and it is an outstanding, game-changing technology.
Want to log in to Citrix StoreFront without using a password and/or a token? Simply enter your username and use your phone to authenticate with your biometrics. Simple and easy.
Do you use NetScaler? I can provide exactly the same capability to eliminate passwords and tokens and use biometric for authentication with Veridium.
Or have you migrated to Citrix Cloud? Yes, you can use your biometrics to authenticate into Citrix Cloud with Veridium too.
If you would like to learn more, come and see me and the amazing Veridium team at Citrix Synergy, May 8-10, in the expo hall at booth 419. We’ll show you how Veridium can simplify your life, by eliminating passwords and tokens throughout your Citrix environment with ease. Not at Synergy this year? Ask for a demonstration in the Citrix EBC near you.
Today, I no longer sweat about passwords and password policy enforcement, I use biometrics to authenticate into all my services. And no calls to the Veridium help desk for password issues. Hopefully, I’ll bump into some of my Microsoft friends and see if I can help them save the $2M a month they spend on password issues with their help desk.
