Citrix have long been witnessing the success of Microsoft 365 and working out how they can replicate that success with their products. Citrix have been long-standing partners of Microsoft and have always worked to enhance Microsoft products. Whether that is by building on Microsoft RDS technology to deliver VDI and Shared Desktops to organisations or providing collaboration servers that utilise Office Web Apps.
Citrix have now successfully repeated the success of Microsoft 365, by removing the infrastructure management burden from their most popular product, enabling IT Staff to focus on supporting their users and delivering the applications and desktops. All of the infrastructure services such as the Delivery Controllers, StoreFront, Licensing server, MS SQL Databases, Studio, Director and even the Citrix Gateway (formerly Citrix NetScaler Gateway) are all Citrix Cloud’s responsibility now. As such, these are automatically updated with zero downtime, much like with Microsoft’s Exchange Online. No need to spend half a day upgrading all of your infrastructure to the latest release of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (formerly XenApps and XenDesktop) anymore. In fact, there are some updates that are exclusive to Citrix Cloud, such as having “Web Studio”. Which has the full functionality of the normal Citrix Studio console, but in a fast and clean HTML5 console.
Citrix Cloud doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to commit to using Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure though. You can take advantage of the Citrix Cloud services whilst using your on-premise resources. Thus giving your equipment a new lease of life or simply offload the work from ensuring that the infrastructure is up-to-date with the latest security patches. If you did want to consider utilising Public Cloud resources, Citrix Cloud enables you to connect to hosting resources under Microsoft Azure and AWS accounts. One could for instance, have their main workloads on-premise and have users connecting through Citrix Cloud to their Citrix Desktops on-premise and have resources available in Public Cloud in the event of a site failure, enabling your users to continue working with minimal disruption. Citrix Cloud offers an exclusive auto-scaling feature on Delivery Groups that will spin up more Machines in the Delivery Group as demand grows, allowing you to keep costs down by paying only for what you use.
As a Citrix Cloud Service Provider we can assist with understanding whether this product is right for you. We offer 30 day trials of Citrix Cloud services for you and we can assist in getting a proof-of-concept running for your organisation. Please give us a call at 01684 215165 or email info@spectrum-it.uk with your enquiry and we will endeavour to get back to you.