Fashioning the future of work

As one of the world’s premium brands for casual wear, Marc O’Polo is always thinking ahead and on top of trends. While many companies viewed the shift to remote work as a pandemic-inspired fad, the Stockholm-based fashion label knew better and began designing a digital workspace that would allow its employees to work from anywhere using solutions from Citrix. 

"Our goal is to create conditions under which our 2,000 employees worldwide can develop their full creativity and work together optimally, wherever they happen to be,” said Matthias Holzner, Manager IT Application & Collaboration, Marc O’Polo. 

Delivering the future work

To achieve this, Marc O’Polo has implemented a range of Citrix digital workspace solutions through which it can provide consistent, secure and reliable access to the systems, applications and data its team needs to get work done, wherever it needs to get done, including: Citrix DaaS, Citrix Gateway, Citrix Analytics for Security and Citrix Analytics for Performance. 

To ensure its collections get in the hands of retail partners in over 30 countries in a timely manner requires reliable access to a host of graphics and creative applications, along with Enterprise Resource Planning software, which controls all the company’s production and sales processes.

With Citrix, Marc O’Polo can deliver it. “We are perfectly prepared for any configuration of the hybrid working world and can optimally support our flexwork strategy,” Holzner said. “Our employees can log in and work creatively from anywhere, thanks to Citrix infrastructure.”

Maximising security

And, of critical importance, they can do so in a highly secure manner After being hit by a ransomware attack in 2019, Holzner and his team began a complete overhaul of the company’s IT infrastructure to improve the company’s security posture, and with support from Citrix Gold Solution Advisor Provectus Technologies, shifted management of its environment to Citrix Cloud, leaving only servers with virtual applications operated on-premises.

“This ensures that all updates and security patches are installed automatically and that the environment is always up to date,” Holzner said. It also provides for continuous monitoring and optimisation of the security and performance of the Marc O’Polo digital workspaces via Citrix Analytics for Security, which Holzner says play a central role in the company’s overall security strategy. 

“The Citrix Analytics for Security dashboard gives us a complete overview of potential risks and uses traffic light colors to see where intervention is needed, and many actions can then be automated via policies,” Holzner said. “If, for example, a user who was registered in Stephanskirchen during the day logs in from an address in Asia a few hours later, the account is immediately blocked and our team is notified.”

Enhancing user experience

In addition, the company uses Citrix Analytics for Performance to ensure its users have a reliable experience that enables them to perform at their best. By aggregating and presenting all relevant performance data, the service provides valuable insights and concrete troubleshooting suggestions the Marc O’Polo team can use to quickly identify and resolve issues and mitigate their impact. And it’s seeing results.

"Analytics for Performance has optimised our user support, as we can use it to find out very quickly why application response times are not satisfactory for individual-users,” Holzner said. “In one specific case, for example, we found outdated software clients on the user’s end devices, which were significantly slowing down login times, and fixed them right away.”

Simplifying IT

The new Citrix environment has also radically simplified IT. "We used to spend an average of one hour a day checking each system,” Holzner said. “Today, we can simply rely on the environment to be available and up to date.”