Six Key Reasons to Use NetScaler in Azure
Azure adoption continued to gather momentum in 2024 with an increasing number of SMBs joining 80% of enterprises on the Microsoft Public Cloud*. While some organisations are still in the planning stages of service migration, many early adopters have found the limitations and costs associated with the Azure cloud native offerings have presented new challenges in managing application delivery, security, operational efficiency and budget.
Recent technical enhancements to the Azure control plane have simplified the complexity and cost of deploying NetScaler as an alternative to the Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Traffic Manager, WAF and associated Azure subscriptions. Regardless of how it’s licensed – Citrix Universal HMC, Citrix Platform licence or stand-alone per instance subscription – this post highlights six compelling reasons why you should use NetScaler in Azure.
1. Reduced Operating Cost
Cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control, particularly with Azure-native security and networking services that charge per request, per rule, and per hour. NetScaler provides a more cost-effective alternative with fixed subscription pricing and greater technical capability in a smaller footprint.
Organisations leveraging Citrix Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud (UHMC) or Platform subscriptions can run unlimited NetScaler instances with up to 1,000Gbps of throughput anywhere in Azure at no additional cost. The elimination of costly add-ons such as Azure’s WAF, Application Gateway, or Traffic Manager significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO), even with the hosting costs associated with NetScaler.
Key Benefits:
- Predictable pricing– Fixed-cost model vs. Azure’s per-usage billing.
- No additional costs for scaling– Unlike Azure-native services that charge per Gb, NetScaler includes features like WAF, Bot Management, SSL offloading, caching, and global server load balancing at no extra cost.
- Greater ROI on Citrix investments– Many organisations already have entitlements for NetScaler within their Citrix UHMC or platform licences.
2. Enhanced Security and Application Protection
Security is a growing concern for organisations operating in Azure, especially given the increasing sophistication of cyber threats and technical limitations of cloud-native security solutions. NetScaler’s huge feature set provides enterprise-grade security capabilities that significantly and constantly outperform Azure subscription offerings, all condensed into its highly efficient footprint.
Many Azure NetScaler deployments find value in the Web Application Firewall (WAF), which delivers deep visibility and inspection capabilities with super quick, click to deploy hardening. The ability to detect and mitigate threats in real-time ensures a strong security posture without the pay-per-rule pricing of the Azure WAF offering.
Key Benefits:
- Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF)– Provides deeper, more effective threat protection.
- Integrated bot management– Detects and mitigates bot attacks such as credential stuffing and DDoS attempts.
- Enhanced visibility into attacks– Offers rich analytics and reporting capabilities.
- No additional rule costs– Reduces the economic burden of security at scale.
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3. Improved Observability and Traffic Management
Our conversations with Azure subscribers frequently reference the lack of deep visibility into application performance and security threats in the cloud-native offerings. This makes it difficult to manage UX and more importantly, very challenging to understand what malicious activities your service is being attacked by. The general concern is not knowing what battle you are fighting, making it extremely difficult to provide a sufficient response to cyber-attack.
NetScaler includes a centralised management console that provides detailed service observability from the origin to the endpoint. This rapidly accelerates troubleshooting, with detailed analytics for traffic flow, security risks, and user experience available within the NetScaler system, or available to export to a SIEM of choice.
Key Benefits:
- Full visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments– NetScaler provides a detailed, unified view of performance and security, for Azure and all other HMC service locations.
- Intelligent traffic routing and real-time metrics– Ensures optimal service resilience and user experience.
- Centralised management with NetScaler Console– Simplifies monitoring multiple application instances across various locations.
4. Optimised Performance
Historically, High Availability NetScaler in Azure deployments had to have an Azure-native Load Balancer (ALB) deployed in front of them to manage failover scenarios. In addition to the cost associated with the ALB subscription, this extra link in the delivery chain added more latency to the service, and, due to API calls for Azure purposes, a failover time typical in excess of a minute. These are very bad things if site reliability and user experience are high priority.
Expanding out across the various Azure global presences starting Q1 2025, changes to Azure’s control plane now allow organisations to deploy HA NetScalers without the need for the ALB subscription. This reduces clock cycle costs, resulting in improved performance by the removal of the ALB layer of network processing.
Key Benefits:
- Faster failover times– Reduced from over a minute to sub-10 seconds in most cases.
- Simplified architecture– NetScaler directly manages traffic without dependency on Azure LB.
- Lower latency– Reducing active network components shortens the path between endpoint and service origin.
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5. Consistent Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Experience
Many enterprises operate in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, leveraging both traditional physical data centres and at least one of the big cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud). This typically results in an n+1 app delivery and security solution approach with traditional vendors like NetScaler, f5, Fortinet and Kemp in traditional locations, and cloud native solutions bundled in to the public cloud subscription.
Having an n+1 HMC delivery model creates operational and security inconsistency across the estate, significantly increases administrator effort and the risk of configuration error, often requires investment in 3rd party solutions to gain any level of service visibility and burns through budget due to hidden costs and inefficiency.
NetScaler’s consistent codebase across environments makes it a seamless choice for businesses seeking uniform application delivery across their infrastructure. Having the same traffic management and security tools available in every hybrid cloud location significantly reduces cloud friction, improves service agility and simplifies the technical challenges of migrating from on-prem to the cloud.
Key Benefits:
- Single codebase for on-prem and cloud deployments– Ensures operational and security consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
- Cloud neutrality– Unlike Azure-native tools, which lock users into the Microsoft ecosystem, NetScaler can be deployed in any public or private cloud.
- Simplified migrations and failover strategies– Reduces downtime and complexity when moving applications between hybrid and multi-cloud locations.
6. Advanced Automation and DevOps-Friendly Features
Modern IT environments demand high levels of automation, to reduce administrator effort for BAU tasks, remove the risk of manual configuration error and provide the foundations for hands free infrastructure provisioning and management. For this reason, a significant amount of the NetScaler development budget in recent years has been devoted to automation, either from the centralised management console or via its open API framework for DevOps friendly integration to CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and Ansible.
A great example of this is the recently introduced Zero-Touch SSL Certificate Management, which simplifies the complex process of manually updating and renewing certificates across hybrid cloud environments. As the industry looks to shorter certificate lifespans to improve security posture, automating what was once a time-consuming manual process further enhances the value of NetScaler for organisations of all sizes.
Key Benefits:
- Automated certificate management– Ensures security without manual intervention.
- API-driven architecture– Enables seamless integration into DevOps workflows.
- Efficient policy enforcement– Security and traffic management rules can be dynamically updated without downtime.
Azure native load balancing & security, or NetScaler?
As organisations continue to expand their cloud presence, the need for a robust, efficient, and cost-effective application delivery and security solution becomes paramount. NetScaler in Azure provides a powerful alternative to Azure-native services, offering superior performance, enhanced security, improved visibility, and significant cost savings. By integrating NetScaler into your Azure strategy, you can optimise cloud operations while maintaining flexibility across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
Sound good?
Get in touch to learn more about how NetScaler can improve Azure service performance and RoI. Call 0330 010 3443 or mail [email protected].
