Citrix Adds AI Traffic Governance with NetScaler MCP Gateway

Citrix, a Cloud Software Group company, today announced updates to its high-performance application delivery and security platform NetScaler®, introducing MCP Gateway functionality to allow enterprises to securely route, govern and observe agent traffic to backend Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. In addition, the company unveiled other enhancements to NetScaler® AI Gateway, just launched in April, that extend model routing and token-level usage tracking for LLM traffic. Together, the capabilities enable organizations to govern both sides of enterprise AI from a single platform and dashboard, establishing NetScaler as a unified governance control point for enterprise AI traffic.

Also Read: Infrastructure as Code Security: Why Policy as Code Is Becoming Essential

As enterprises deploy AI agents that interact with business systems, data and workflows, they face a new governance challenge. MCP servers, endpoints, authentication models and agent actions can quickly proliferate without centralized governance. Many AI proof-of-concepts (POCs) face barriers scaling due to ineffective governance, weak risk controls, and inadequate AI-ready data. Gartner® finds that “in 2024, 60% of GenAI POCs were abandoned upon completion. In 2029, this will be 35%.”¹ NetScaler AI Gateway, now with MCP Gateway functionality, helps organizations establish governance before scaling — turning agentic AI from an unmanaged set of endpoints into controlled, auditable infrastructure.

“As agents become pervasive elements of the modern enterprise, querying systems of record through MCPs will become the new API call,” said Steve Shah, general manager of NetScaler at Citrix. “Protecting systems of record with clear policies for who can access which services and ensuring that such requests are handled safely, will be a key for modern security and regulatory compliance. It is not a matter of if, but when, cyber-insurance requirements will mandate the use of MCP gateways to protect against dangerous agents. NetScaler MCP Gateway helps enterprises position themselves for a new reality in which MCP gateways will be a requirement for AI risk mitigation.”

The NetScaler MCP Gateway capabilities provide a single governed entry point for MCP clients, dynamically routing requests to approved backend MCP servers instead of forcing teams to manage fragmented endpoints and authentication methods. For regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and public sector, this is critical as AI agents access sensitive systems where controlled and auditable access is non-negotiable.

MCP Gateway tackles the governance gap in agentic AI

MCP is becoming a standard way for AI agents to connect to enterprise applications and tools. But as organizations adopt MCP, they face a familiar infrastructure problem at a new layer: multiple servers, inconsistent access controls, limited visibility and unpredictable request volumes. NetScaler brings the agentic layer under centralized policy and operational control. Key capabilities include:

• Centralized authentication and granular control: MCP Gateway allows teams to enforce identity consistently across MCP deployments — with per-user and global tokens, OAuth and hybrid flows — in addition to tool-based rate limiting and server allow/block lists to keep agents on approved servers and prevent runaway usage.
• Reliability for multi-step agent workflows: Session persistence and protocol-aware monitoring keep agents connected to the right back-end server and confirm MCP servers remain healthy during longer workflows.
• Model routing and usage visibility for LLM traffic: Content switching-based model routing and usage tracking by team, user or application, extending centralized governance to LLM traffic.

Together, these capabilities help security, infrastructure and AI platform teams govern agent and LLM traffic from one dashboard, improving visibility, control and reliability as enterprise AI moves from experimentation into production.

Extending AI Gateway for multi-provider AI workloads

Citrix is also expanding NetScaler AI Gateway with content switching-based model routing and usage tracking. These enhancements allow incoming chat requests from AI agents and applications to be routed to different models based on policy, while giving teams visibility into input and output tokens or requests by team, user or application. Together, they help enterprises optimize cost and performance across multiple model providers, avoid vendor lock-in and hold teams accountable for AI spend.

Also Read: GitOps and Infrastructure as Code: Building Fully Automated Cloud Operations

Citrix is enabling a Claude Code use case in private tech preview. NetScaler AI Gateway acts as an LLM gateway in front of Claude Code, serving as a single control point for developers accessing Anthropic models through a service provider. By combining centralized authentication and provider-agnostic routing with NetScaler AI Gateway capabilities, the solution provides administrators the centralized control they need to manage Claude Code access across thousands of developers. This eliminates the need to enforce identity twice and gives enterprises the flexibility to support high-demand AI development workflows as usage scales or switches across providers.

Built for high-volume AI traffic, NetScaler scales AI governance

NetScaler is unique in combining governance for both LLM and MCP traffic from a single platform with its proprietary single-pass architecture. This matters because AI traffic is highly volumetric in both size and packets. Chaining separate proxies and point tools can add inspection steps, additional hops and latency at exactly the point where AI performance is most sensitive.

The NetScaler platform’s single-pass architecture is designed to perform traffic management, authentication, routing, security inspection, rate limiting and observability in one pass through the data path. This helps organizations apply the governance AI requires while minimizing latency and central processing unit overhead for high-volume workloads. The same approach extends to MCP traffic, where multi-step agent workflows benefit from efficient handling, session persistence and centralized control.

For customers on Citrix Platform License or Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud, these NetScaler enhancements are included at no additional cost. These licenses include unlimited NetScaler instances and bandwidth, helping enterprises scale AI governance without adding separate gateway licensing or capacity-based cost barriers.

Proven at scale with Citrix Aidrien

Citrix has been running NetScaler AI Gateway in production as part of the control layer for Citrix Aidrien™, its AI-powered in-product assistant. NetScaler governs every prompt, model interaction and token for Citrix Aidrien, demonstrating that the same governance, security, rate limiting, intelligent routing and observability capabilities being brought to customers are already operating at enterprise scale inside Citrix.

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