I hope you were able to make the Citrix Cloud Summit on October 8. Missed it? That’s OK. You can view all the great sessions on demand.
And this week, you’ll get to learn more about how cloud-based services can give your organization a competitive advantage with improved employee experience, simplified IT, and comprehensive modernized security at the Citrix Workspace Summit, where we’ll dive deeper into new automated cloud-transition tools, dedicated customer success managers, and Citrix service offerings that make now the best time for a smooth transition to the cloud.
What is Citrix Cloud? What ISN’T Citrix Cloud?
Citrix Cloud is a platform that hosts and administers Citrix services. It connects to your resources through connectors on any cloud or infrastructure you choose (on premises, public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud). It allows you to create, manage, and deploy workspaces with apps and data to your end users from a single console. Often, when we talk to customers about Citrix Cloud, they think we’re asking them to move all of their VDA workloads to a place called Citrix Cloud. This is a common misconception. Citrix Cloud (synonymous with the Citrix Workspace platform) is simply a hosted management and control plane. The workloads can live anywhere — on premises, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud. It’s up to you.
New Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service Offerings
New Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service offerings make it more affordable to migrate your existing Citrix management components to the cloud. We’ve recently introduced Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Advanced service and Citrix Virtual Apps Advanced service. Both include support for concurrent (CCU) and user-based term licensing. Now, existing Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops/Citrix Virtual Apps Advanced (on-prem) customers can do a “like-for-like” transition to the cloud without having to upgrade to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium service.
The Benefits of Moving Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to the Cloud
Citrix has been delivering cloud-based services for more than five years. We have more than 7.5 million daily subscribers for our cloud-based services and a YOY growth rate of 44 percent, similar to other industry-leading cloud platforms. We’re well beyond, the “early adopter” phase; in fact, current adoption would be considered “late majority.”
Of course, there are the standard benefits of cloud adoption — a lower upfront cost of entry, OpEX spending, a hosted/evergreen solution, simplified procurement, and predictable costs. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service also includes features not available with our on-prem offerings such as autoscale technology and support for Windows 10 multi-session.
All Citrix cloud transitions and trade-ups come with hybrid-rights licensing. That gives customers the licensing rights to run their existing on-prem solutions while transitioning to the cloud service over time — for the duration of their trade-up/transition contract terms.
Moving from Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to Citrix Workspace Service
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service is only one of many services offered from the Citrix Workspace platform. Adding other Citrix Workspace services helps you to create a better, more secure and cost effective digital workspace experience for your entire workforce.
Maximize Employee Experience: With more employees working remotely, it’s likely that they’re also working from different device types. Citrix Workspace offers a single window for workers to access all their applications (including SaaS and web apps), files, virtual desktops, microapp workflows, and more. Serving as an identity broker, aggregating identity provider solutions, Citrix Workspace requires only one contextual based (MFA) log-in to access an entire multi-vendor workspace. Working from a single window makes workers more productive and engaged and keeps them focused on the tasks at hand.
In addition to aggregating multiple (and multi-vendor) workspace experiences into one, Citrix Workspace offers microapp technology, which enables employees to bypass the complicated navigation of enterprise apps to accomplish basic tasks. In the example below, we show how easy it can be to approve an expense report in seconds rather than minutes.
Comprehensive security from a single platform/management plane: We probably don’t talk enough about the platform benefits of a single-vendor digital workspace. Delivering a complete workspace requires the delivery of numerous services including SSO, endpoint management, file sync/share (collaboration), secure access, secure browsing, virtualized apps and desktops — the list goes on and on.
The problem with multi-vendor workspace solutions is that they lack scalability and create unnecessary complexity. Think about it. If it requires five different vendors to patch together a complete workspace for the end user, that’s five different management consoles, reporting tools, provisioning systems, and more. If something breaks or is configured improperly, it can create a domino effect, making troubleshooting nearly impossible.
Citrix Workspace solves the challenges that come with a multi-vendor workspace solution. The image above shows how Citrix can deliver a complete, secure workspace from a single unified platform. Once the platform is in place, it’s incredibly easy to turn on new security services, creating a more agile environment for IT. Learn more about our comprehensive set of security use cases, including VPN-less access and zero trust security.
When some vendors claim to support a complete stack of technology, it usually means they do a couple of things really well, a couple things OK, and a couple of things not so good. Citrix Workspace is unique because we’re able to offer industry-leading, best-of-breed products across the entire stack. In other words, you don’t have to forfeit high quality services and products to get the benefit of a single-vendor platform approach to workspace delivery. With Citrix, you’ll get the best of both worlds.
Expanding on the idea of vendor consolidation to create a better end-user experience and simplified IT experience, Citrix also has a complete suite of application delivery solutions. Just like our Workspace services, our application delivery solutions provide industry-leading technology. The integration between Citrix Workspace services and application delivery solutions (the plumbing) ensures that users get the best possible experience and performance from their workspace. Citrix’s application delivery solutions can prioritize your most important and time-sensitive traffic, steer SaaS/web traffic across the best possible routed paths, optimize packet transfer, and so much more. Learn more about Citrix SD-WAN and Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC).
Improved user visibility, for user security and performance, supporting flexible work environments: Monitoring user behavior and application performance for flexible work environments can be difficult. Citrix Analytics for Security provides automated, actionable, user-based behavioral threat detection. Citrix Analytics for Performance can detect several factors affecting the overall user experience for your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment, including session launch times, application responsiveness, and network latency.
Similar to the way Citrix Analytics for Security creates a risk profile for each user, Citrix Performance Analytics creates a user experience score. The ability to visualize and remediate individual performance issues will help to keep remote workers productive and engaged because their apps are performing the way they’re supposed to. Citrix Analytics can add value to all Citrix environments, including both on-prem and cloud-based deployments.
A platform approach to workspace adoption can save you money: Stitching together a multi-vendor workspace solution creates unnecessary IT complexity and spending. In the example below, you can see that multi-vendor subscriptions can quickly added up to well over $1,000/user/year. Contrast that with the long list of service entitlements that come with a single subscription to Citrix Workspace Premium Plus. The savings with Citrix workspace are significant.
Modernizing your current infrastructure, while taking advantage of cloud-based service offerings can provide a better user experience for distributed workers, unified management with comprehensive security, better visibility and control for remote workers with Citrix Analytics, and significant cost savings over time.
Join the Citrix Workspace Summit
Want to learn more about Citrix Workspace. Check out the Citrix Workspace Summit, this Thursday, October 22. You’ll learn how secure digital workspace technology not only lets you adapt to change, but also unlock people’s full potential. Learn how to create a flexible work model that empowers employees to work easily and securely from anywhere. And it’s free to register! Sign up today.
Sources for data in figure 2:
