NetScaler AI Gateway delivers governance, cost control, and scalability for enterprise AI workloads

Citrix, a Cloud Software Group company, today announced new AI governance capabilities for NetScaler®, its modern, high-performance application delivery and security platform. NetScaler® AI Gateway helps control large language model (LLM) costs and performance, and secure AI application delivery across the enterprise.

As enterprise AI adoption moves from experimentation to production, enterprises require the same application delivery foundation for AI inference traffic. NetScaler AI Gateway extends the platform’s proven strengths in application delivery, security, observability, and governance to AI workloads, enabling enterprises to manage AI applications with the same operational discipline used for other mission-critical services.

“AI is becoming embedded in the operational fabric of the enterprise,” said Steve Shah, general manager of NetScaler at Citrix. “Before organizations scale AI across core business processes, they need trusted guardrails to manage risk, control cost, and maintain performance. NetScaler AI Gateway extends our leadership in enterprise application delivery into the AI era, enabling organizations to run AI services with the governance, visibility, and operational confidence required for mission-critical deployments.”

NetScaler AI Gateway is already integrated with Citrix Aidrien™, Citrix’s AI-powered in-product assistant. The architecture of Citrix Aidrien relies on NetScaler to manage and secure AI traffic as part of its production deployment — demonstrating that NetScaler AI Gateway is a production-ready control layer for AI systems already running at enterprise scale.

Citrix is also announcing NetScaler integration with Protecto, an AI-native data protection platform. The integration connects Protecto's agentic data classification capabilities to NetScaler AI Gateway, ensuring sensitive information is detected and masked before it reaches AI workflows, while preserving the usability of the data. This ultimately helps enterprises accelerate AI adoption without compromising compliance, security, or customer trust.

Protecto Founder and CEO Amar Kanagaraj said, "Every enterprise racing to deploy AI faces the same dilemma: move fast and risk exposing customer data, or slow down and lose competitive ground. That trade-off shouldn't exist. Protecto's agentic data classification catches what traditional AI security tools miss, and integrates directly with NetScaler AI Gateway to block or mask sensitive data before it ever reaches AI systems — without losing the context AI needs to function accurately. Enterprises can finally scale AI at full speed without putting their data at risk."

NetScaler AI Gateway Tackles the Governance and Cost Barriers to Scaling AI

AI workloads introduce new traffic patterns, cost models, and governance challenges that traditional infrastructure was not designed to manage. NetScaler AI Gateway replaces a fragmented collection of point tools and eliminates the need to build separate policies for each AI application — delivering a unified control layer built into the platform enterprises already trust for critical application delivery. This approach enables organizations to extend existing operational policies and infrastructure controls to AI systems without introducing additional silos.

"As enterprises transition AI from pilot to production environments, the challenges shift from model selection and experimentation to governance, visibility, and control," said Paul Nicholson, research vice president, cloud and datacenter networks at IDC. "Organizations require centralized, policy-driven control to ensure visibility, repeatability, and accountability for AI services at scale. Solutions like NetScaler AI Gateway can help organizations address these evolving enterprise requirements."

How NetScaler AI Gateway Works

Key capabilities of NetScaler AI Gateway include:

• Token-based rate limiting to help control LLM usage costs and enforce fair consumption across teams and applications
• Token-latency-based load balancing that optimizes performance, cost, and reliability by intelligently routing inference requests across multiple LLM backends
• Spillover routing that automatically redirects requests to a secondary model when token quotas are exhausted, ensuring continuity instead of request failure
• Prompt management and LLM redaction that enforce consistent governance behavior by intercepting and modifying prompts in transit and protecting sensitive information
• Integration with best-of-breed AI security platforms, such as Enkrypt AI LLM Firewall for Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) LLM threat detection and Protecto for context-aware detection and masking of sensitive data such as personally identifiable information
• Web application firewall protections for LLMs and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, available in the latest NetScaler signature updates
• AI-specific observability with metrics and logs covering token usage, latency, and quota violations, exportable to analytics platforms for visibility and troubleshooting

NetScaler AI Gateway builds on Citrix’s broader secure-by-design approach to AI, including integrations with AI security and LLM firewall technologies designed to protect enterprise AI deployments. Complementing NetScaler AI Gateway, the NetScaler® Console MCP Server securely connects AI agents to operational intelligence through a standardized MCP interface — extending the same governance and visibility to agentic AI workflows.

These capabilities allow enterprises to treat AI as a managed service across the business — rather than experimentation with predictable spending tied to token usage, improved performance through token-aware traffic management, and secure access to trusted operational intelligence.

NetScaler AI Gateway expands the NetScaler platform's ability to bring enterprise-grade governance, cost control, and security to LLM projects at scale. The NetScaler Console MCP Server further extends this foundation by enabling governed, AI-ready operational insight for enterprises embracing agentic workflows. Both NetScaler AI Gateway and NetScaler Console MCP Server are available to customers now.

Additional information about NetScaler AI Gateway is available here.

About Citrix

Citrix, a Cloud Software Group company, provides a secure app and desktop delivery platform that companies of all sizes can use to enable secure, flexible work. With Citrix, employees can work where and how they prefer, and IT can be confident their information and devices remain safe. Click here to learn more about Citrix solutions and the value they can provide.

For more information on the Citrix platform, please visit www.citrix.com.

Citrix, NetScaler, and the Citrix logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification.

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