The cloud has a lot to offer your business, but the transition can bring a few headaches for IT along the way. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service in Citrix Cloud can ease some of that pain. Here are a few ways Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service can help you make a fast, flexible, and secure move to the cloud.

Move Fast to Meet Changing Workforce Needs

As we saw all too clearly in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, the ability to move fast can make all the difference in responding to changing business needs. Even in routine times, it’s valuable to be able to onboard people and locations quickly when your organization is adding headcount, completing a merger or acquisition, or reshaping your geographic footprint.

With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, you can deploy existing desktop images and application packages to new users in a matter of hours, not weeks, so employees can get right to work. You can also bring new cloud-hosted workloads online to supplement existing data centers, and maintain and monitor these hybrid deployments from a single console.

Make Flexible Use of Cloud and On-Premises Resources

Not every organization wants to shift all workloads to the cloud at once. A staged, flexible approach can make a lot of sense. Citrix Cloud lets you choose where you host your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops workloads, with full functionality whether you choose public clouds or on-premises datacenters. Today, many of our customers leverage hybrid deployments, making the most of existing datacenter capacity while bringing new cloud workloads online. As your needs change or unexpected events emerge, you can scale up environments and expand workloads quickly and easily, while using just-in-time cloud workload provisioning to avoid waste and only pay for what you need.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service also lets you choose freely among public cloud providers — Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google GCP, or all of the above — and hosting locations. That way, you’ve got the flexibility to do whatever makes the most sense for your business based on user type, data sovereignty requirements, geographic region, available capacity, or any other priority. Workloads can be scaled, and balanced seamlessly across environments. It’s also easy to manage workloads in multiple locations, and your team can use the same tools for both on-premises and cloud apps and desktops. By maintaining optimal user density in your data center, then bursting into the cloud when more capacity is needed, you can get both cost efficiencies and reliable performance.

Keep Security Consistent, Wherever People Work and Wherever Apps and Data Live

Evolving to a more complex hybrid cloud or multi-cloud infrastructure, together with a more dispersed workforce, can leave IT professionals thinking, “How am I going to keep all this secure?” With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, you can use a single identity solution to secure apps and data both on-premises and in the cloud. Users get a better, more consistent experience, including single sign-on to Windows, web, or SaaS applications, over any network to help them get to work quickly and easily.

Simplify Management While Keeping Things Up to Date

You’re busy enough without getting bogged down watching server statistics and rolling out software patches. With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, the Citrix Cloud team handles your day-to-day management and maintenance, even when your app and desktop workloads stay in your on-premises datacenter. We’ll make new feature, performance, and security updates available right away, so users always get the best experience and the latest functionality. And Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service isn’t a pared-down version of our on-premises solution — we have full feature parity, together with cloud-native value-adds like autoscaling.

Whatever your cloud strategy look like — and whatever it might look like tomorrow — Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service can help you execute it more easily and efficiently with the performance, security, and agility your business is counting on.

Learn more about Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. Contact us for an expert-led demo.