Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) Reviews

I used it because we had to work from home during COVID, and that's about it. I'm not using it any longer because we're now back to work.

I work for the State of Illinois, and we were able to stay open and provide the services for the needs of the people of the State of Illinois during COVID, which included unemployment services and everything else like that.

Its user-friendliness is most valuable. It was easy to log in and navigate. Some of such solutions are not very user-friendly, but this one was.

In the beginning, it did not go so well because, depending on the type of internet service at home, some people didn't play very nice with it, but once we got over that initial internet incompatibility, it worked fine.

It is slow. When everybody is logged in, it does have a tendency to slow down. You can tell the connectivity slows down a little bit, but it's still a good product. 

When you're doing Webex, there are a few features that are disabled when you're working from home. Sharing screens is a bit hard. The screen is grainy. It doesn't look as clear if you were just sitting at your desktop.

I last worked with it in March.

It is a good, stable product, but if there is bad weather or if you live out in the country, it has a tendency to drop. Connectivity can be a little flaky.

It is very scalable because we started with 15,000, and by the time we finished using it, we had almost 30,000 people on it. We doubled.

We had directors using it. We had techs. All kinds of people who worked for the State of Illinois were using it to do their jobs. It was used all the way down from maintenance people to all the way up to even the governor. The governor was using it.

We still have some people who are working from home. So, some people are still using it.

I didn't take care of any of the tickets. If I had a problem, I called our help desk, and within two to three hours, the issue was fixed.

It was very user-friendly. It was one of the easiest software I've installed. To deploy it, it took us less than a week, and that was for over 15,000 users.

It was deployed in-house. We have an in-house Citrix group that basically takes care of all the updating, the patching of the server, and everything. When we purchased the product, they did come in and train some of our people. We were very pleased with that.

If you're a medium-scale or a small-scale business, it works great. As far as I know, our agency didn't have a whole lot of issues other than the people who live out in the country. We did have a few issues with those people, but once we got them set up through their own Wi-Fi and everything, it was great. It was just a simple tweaking, but it's a good, stable product. It really is.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. The reason I'm going to give it a nine and not a ten is that overall, it is a good, stable product, but people who live out and not in city limits could have issues setting it up at first. If there's bad weather with rain or wind, they may have some connectivity issues.

Use cases are situations where multiple people require the use of some apps, whether Chrome or SAP, for example. We primarily use it for app launches and we deliver multi-session OS.

The solution has improved over time. For example, one of the functionalities that has been incorporated into the latest versions is the Local Host Cache. Another improvement is zones. There is also something called Local Text Echo that was introduced with version 7.9 or 7.11. These features have helped us to adapt the product within different customer organizations and within our own organization as well.

Additional benefits the solution has provided are work from home and bring your own device. These have made us more efficient in terms of being able to work wherever we want and through whatever device we'd like to work on. Encouraging people to work from home and reducing dependency on fat clients, like laptops and desktops, and providing them with thin clients or zero clients, we'll be able to save on costs. With fat clients, the renewal cycle is around three to five years, whereas the renewal cycle for thin clients or zero clients is around seven to 10 years.

The app protection feature is one of the most valuable because it provides good security, as nobody is going to be able to look into your screen while you are sharing the screen. And if someone has installed a keylogger in your system, your keystrokes will be jumbled up and they would not make any sense to the keylogger. App protection is one of the coolest security features that I have encountered on any platform.

Our company is a systems integrator and I have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for around eight years.

We have multiple versions, including Citrix Cloud and 7.15 LTSR (Long Term Service Release). Some customers are running with 7.6 LTSR and some are running on 1912 LTSR as well. But none of them are using the current release. In our organization we are also running on 1912 LTSR.

Right now it is on-prem, and in the next three to six months it will be going to the cloud.

The solution is quite stable. Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the time, I find that issues belong to the dependent components, like network, storage, another profiling solution, or the cloud. Around 30 to 40 percent of the time it is Citrix that is the culprit. But it is quite stable.

It is quite scalable and robust as well. On our platform we have more than a million users. And we are trying to increase the use cases so that we will have better penetration among all users.

I'm an ex-Citrix guy. I was part of support and post-sales activities and I was involved in sales activities as well. I would not rate their support as high as I would have during the time I worked there.

In part it's because they hire people from the market who may or may not have a complete understanding of the product. That is okay, but once you onboard them for support, you need to get them trained properly. Once they are trained, you need to understand their current skill set and level, and that may not be happening. That's the reason, when you jump on a call with Citrix support, they lack some basic understanding. Troubleshooting is an art. It is not just knowing about technical things. It is also asking the right questions. That level of understanding and knowledge only comes with a lot of practice.

Neutral

Setting up the solution was straightforward because, at the time, it was all on-prem. But today's solutions that we are deploying are not straightforward to set up. There are cloud, SaaS, and PaaS products, and different profiling solutions. Customers want the best of everything, and that makes the solution a bit complex.

The setup time depends on the number of users. If I look at a standard of 10,000 users, it may take 45 to 60 days, post user-acceptance testing. But if you include the UA phase, the time may go up to three to four months.

To manage Citrix for that same, standard 10,000-user environment, one that is operational 24/7, you would require one SME, two level-threes, four level-twos, and six to eight level-one people.

Citrix solutions cost a lot in comparison with competitors, like Azure Virtual Desktop or VMware Horizon. Those solutions cost around 50 to 60 percent less, per month per user, than Citrix. The leadership of Citrix should really consider the pricing factor. Apart from that, they are the leader in the virtualization of desktop applications.

In our organization we have Azure Virtual Desktop and VMware Horizon. Citrix is not the only solution on which my team and I work.

Scalability is the biggest factor, along with ease of use and the security features that we get. The kinds of features that we get in the Citrix security stack are really phenomenal, and I don't think that kind of feature set is available with any other platform. In addition, it is highly usable, even on choppy or low bandwidth. If customers have issues in their network, it works pretty well.

These days, Citrix lacks innovation, so I would rate the current product stack as an eight out of 10. If they innovate more features for more business use cases, and they try to take more users from on-prem to the cloud, with reduced pricing and better after-sales services, they will definitely get a 10 from me.

My primary use cases for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are for:

• Anyone who wants to modernize their business continuity plan
• Anyone who wants to deal with data regulation compliance
• Anybody who wants to promote a work from home or remote-first strategy for their employees and team members.

In terms of the hardware and software that the service requires our company to make use of, we can typically decommission if our client has existing servers. We can decommission after moving the data off of them. 

My firm is hardware apathetic. I don't care if it runs Citrix Workspace. If our clients want low cost and high performance, we generally point people to the Ncomputing RX420(HDX) which is a Raspberry PI 4 device that mounts very neatly onto the back of the monitor and it can link into their network via wifi or ethernet connection.

It's a fantastic little device that is very manageable, cost-effective, and tends to last for quite a long time. Every time I've put them into place, the desktop environment is a little bit different than what people are used to. The mouse movements are not quite as good as a full house computer, but we're spending a couple of hundred dollars for something that's going to last five to 10 years, versus buying a desktop or even a lightweight desktop for $600 or $700 which is going to last three to five years. Most of my clients have been pretty excited about that trade-off.

There have been radical improvements in IT efficiency. Cost savings are on a case-by-case basis. Some of my clients were not going all-in on any kind of management solution, so their initial monthly cost was higher when they went to Citrix. In most cases, it's a push. They're spending about the same money in either direction. But in a lot of cases, when you start to factor in the cost of downtime, the cost of inefficiency, the cost of a data breach, everyone is realizing much lower costs of management and ongoing costs to their IT department.

It's difficult to approximate how much it has saved because on one hand, I have a client that has 45 or 50 users and they realized a much higher increase of efficiency. A task in the previous model took half an hour, and under the new model, it takes five minutes.

When you spread that over 50 employees, that's a much higher percentage of drop than if a client has 10 employees. It's difficult to approximate but averaged across all of our clients, there is around a 25-to-30% reduction in costs.

We leverage the following technologies: 

• Application virtualization capabilities
• On-premises, desktop virtualization
• Cloud-hosted desktop virtualization
• Citrix managed cloud-hosted desktops

The fact that we can work from any device from any location is the most valuable aspect of the solution for us. In the last year, people have been restricted in their movements and we haven't been allowed to just show up to work. The fact that my clients can leverage a remote-first workplace that allows them a greater ability to recruit from a larger geographic area is valuable for us. 

You don't have to be able to commute to a major Metro in order to work there, you can work from any location. If you want to take a few days with your family but you have some projects that you're working on, it's going to take some of your time, but not all of it. You can just go to your Airbnb or wherever your family is staying and work remotely, do your job, and spend the rest of the time with your family.

Team members are relieved that they can continue to work and put bread on the table. They are relieved in the dichotomy that says they can put their family's needs ahead of their workplace's needs or vice versa. Maybe a child has a medical appointment or a social engagement that they would like to be at. You can fit those around your work schedule, work it out with your children and with wherever it is that they're going. In that way, both the employer and the employee realize a lower cost of operations. They realize increased flexibility and agility in their life. That dichotomy is either minimized or removed entirely. That's been very, very groundbreaking for them.

The deployment and management of hybrid Cloud Apps and Desktops is not 100% seamless, although it is very good. When you start mixing a third-party or a cloud-hosted app, it is generally pretty seamless. You don't notice a difference between a web-based app that you run on a physical machine, on a virtual machine, or through a Workspace. I have not seen any problems with that. A legacy application or a computer-aided design program has very specific requirements that can be a challenge. But with a little bit of research, once you settle on the solution, it's pretty good.

Security is a shining point of the Citrix Workspace. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a very robust solution when security is a concern. Furthermore, the content collaboration data-hosting that Citrix integrates with Virtual Apps and Desktops is among the best there is.

It is the same for the security of clients' intellectual property and data when remote employees use the solution. Content collaboration allows you to share data securely and is supported with two-factor authentication. You can have a consolidated data set with a widely distributed workforce and they can all be on the same sheet of music, all accessing the same data. Version control, access control lists, anything you could wish for, is available in their solution stack.

Citrix simplifies the adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. HIPAA, for example, if you share that data over two or three different clinics or facilities, you have to create and maintain some sort of SD-WAN or VPN in order to make sure that those applications and those datasets are shared only between those locations. With Virtual Apps and Desktops, that either reduces or removes the need for either the VPN or an SD-WAN, because they aren't actually sharing between various locations. You are accessing that data set through various locations. The benefit to that is that you have reduced complexity at the infrastructure level so there's less to troubleshoot. There's less to go wrong.

Templating the deployment process could use improvement. When you start, there are a large number of details that are quite client-specific, although they do share common themes. To get somebody up and running in a day is very difficult to do. They should streamline by use case.

There's always going to be an outlier that doesn't really fit neatly into any one use case, so that's going to have to be more customized. An accountancy firm has sensitive data. They are prime targets for identity thieves that are always looking for an easy target and low-hanging fruit. If they were to template a deployment for an accountancy firm with all the needful things that every accountancy firm is going to have to have, it should be that you can just radio button the Apps so that accountants can tell the backend that they're going to need certain things. Then you can say, "We have this number of users and they need this number of spare desktops - go." And it just built the Azure environment. That would be really great. I don't know that it's actually possible, but it would be really good. 

The other issue is the stocking orders and the monthly reports. They're difficult because we don't do it every day. We do the stocking order once a year and there's always confusion on the backend.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for Azure for a little more than a year now. 

I would rate their support highly. They're very good and very responsive. We had an incident last year that dragged on and on but that was in the thick of having half the workforce that they were used to having and a radically increased call for service because of the pandemic. That's not really a true representation of what they could do. 

Most of the time, if there's an issue, I can fire it off to one of my account managers or through the Citrix portal and get a response back within, depending on the severity of the incident, a few minutes or up to the next business day. Depending on the severity of the problem, the next business day might be just fine. If it's just a little slow and it's irritating, but it's not causing anybody to not be able to work, the next business day is fine. If we're down and we need help right now, having 24-hour support would be excellent but that's kind of impossible.

I've had a client on board with me that was moving from another Citrix provider. They were working on hosting their own Citrix environment and they needed something that wasn't going to fall apart on them. Their customer service really flagged over the last year or so. They moved from a Citrix provider to me.

The deployment strategy widely varies between clients because, on one hand, I have an accountancy firm as well as another very similar solution for a defined benefits management firm. They have very similar needs but their business model is such that even though they've got the same needs, the way I have to meet those needs for each different client throws a monkey wrench into it. 

On the other hand, I have construction companies and engineering firms that could not be more different and customizing the solution for each of them and their needs is challenging. I can get the bones of the infrastructure up in two or three days. Then it takes another two or three days, at minimum, as much as maybe a week or two, to get everything dialed in just the way they like it before we start going into production.

The shortest amount of time I've seen it take to complete implementation is a week but it has taken a lot longer. 

I have seen ROI. It's opened me up as an outsourced IT department to seek and win much more lucrative contracts. Citrix has allowed me to pursue larger clients. Because when you are all on the same sheet of music with how this solution works, how it's supported, where you can deploy, and how onsite support really becomes almost a non-issue, you can seek clientele from every location, not just where you can drive to. It's allowed me to scale quite a lot.

My pricing advice would be to watch your Azure costs. If you're not used to it, like I wasn't last year, they can get very high very quickly and you can go upside down on your agreement very easily.

There is a steep learning curve. In the Cloud-hosted Virtual Apps and Desktops model, as a general rule, there's a high learning curve. If you're going from only providing local assets to your clients, a local server, local workstations, and you're going straight into Virtual Apps and Desktops for the Cloud in Azure, really do your homework. Really learn the tool, really understand how it's supported because you'll save yourself a lot of trouble down the line if you do. If you've got the resources available, throw one person at cost analysis for Azure. So that at least one person in your organization really understands how much something is going to cost to deploy and keep running so that you can size your agreements correctly.

If I could, I would rate Virtual Apps and Desktops an 11 out of 10. I will rate it a ten out of ten. 

We have a ton of use cases. Ever since COVID-19 happened, my organization sent everybody home to work. Using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops has been absolutely critical in keeping our core business functionality going as well as keeping everybody happy, like our customers.

We are a utility. Within our municipality, we are considered an essential service. As an extension of that, using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is absolutely critical to making sure that customers are happy, because we keep the lights on, literally and figuratively, for our customers. 

We currently use Citrix across the board. With people working from home, whether they're on a laptop that's maintained by our organization or a personal laptop, they use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops primarily. We have about 98 percent of people using it today. The use cases vary from actual developers using EDIs to customer service agents who answer the phone for actual customers of my organization. We also have an IT support staff. 

We have all kinds of use cases today, pretty much right across the board. With the agile and dynamic way that Citrix technologies are, we are able to solve each one of those use cases quite well. It is quite impressive how it has all come together

What I currently use in my organization is Citrix Cloud. Within Citrix Cloud, we use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as a service. So, we are fully-baked into the cloud in regards to that. Being in Citrix Cloud, the version gets increased on a regular basis. I'm not sure where we are at right now, but it's always pretty new.

My organization is an essential service. It has been very conservative when it comes to any lockdown policies within our organization. So, they sent people home very early, and it will be awhile before people are working from the office again. Keeping the lights on at my organization, both figuratively and because they are a utility, is absolutely critical and all of that work right now is being done on the backbone of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops with its easy ability to connect via my organization's resources regardless of what device that the user is working on, having that ability to connect from high latency or low latency connections, having consistency of experience when logging in is super critical, and having the analytics to give us data around performance and security has been fantastic because we have been able to make tweaks and optimizations as we go after putting so much load on our Citrix infrastructure.

All of those things combined have been super important in adding value to my organization and how we work now. Before COVID-19 and work from home happened, my organization had approximately 500 concurrent sessions connecting at once. Now, we are up to (because of work from home and COVID-19), we are up to 2,000 connections at once. So, the whole organization is pretty much going through Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, utilizing those services. Having the agility to be able to build out our infrastructure to match the increase in usage has been super key as well. This means technologies within Virtual Apps and Desktop service, such as Machine Creation Services (MCS), and having the ability to build Virtual App and Desktop servers in Azure or on-premise as needed. This has also been super critical because as our user base has grown by four times, then we have had to grow our resources within our Citrix environment by four times.

Remotely, it allows the end user to have the flexibility to be able to access my organization's resources on whatever device they are on, whether it be an iPhone, Android, device that my organization gave them, or their own personal laptop. That is number one. It starts there around that end user experience, giving those users that flexibility to use whatever endpoint device that they want. Around performance and metrics, the Analytics are key. It allows us to identify any pain points that users might have and make quick actions around those things, whether it be increasing resources on some servers/Virtual Desktops or looking at our group policies to optimize them some more. That has been pretty critical for us.

Overall connectivity has been great. Citrix is an industry leader in remote access protocol. This allows anyone from a super high latency connection to fiber Internet connectivity to be able to access our resources and have a similar experience because of the protocols that Citrix uses. It is all of those things combined that allow us to offer end users the best experience that we can. This is really piggybacking off of the mature technologies that Citrix has to offer.

Our organization sports Zero Trust in a few different ways, but we have a ways to go to that model of security. Citrix will be pretty crucial in that. Whereas, we have those capabilities there to offer conditional access, in regards to our end users, we're just not there yet. However, just having the capabilities there and knowing that we can implement them when my organization is ready. This is really crucial because that is one roadblock that we don't have to worry about. The technology is there to be able to do it. It is just a matter of figuring out how we are going to implement those Zero Trust policies, then implementing them when the time is right.

I would describe the solution's centralized policy control and distributed enforcement as robust and agile. I would describe the policies around it as being super secure and well-thought-out. They have the ability to implement policies, getting those policies applied to the sessions and devices that we need them to in a super quick time, which is critical.

Citrix has always been super-focused on being platform agnostic. That has been one of the core tenants of their approach to their technology. I keep on going back to Citrix being flexible with whatever technology that their clients are on, and that certainly is the case with my organization. That is super critical. We know that whatever decisions are made in our organization, in terms of where our resources go, Citrix will be there to support us around that. Having that layer of security offered around those analytics and ability to action items based on those analytics right away is super key.

The utilization of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops has been highly secure. Right from the get go, we have policies in place that prevent anyone from copying data from the data center, application servers, and network share drives to their client device, then back the other way. We have that ideal perfect segregation between corporate data and personal endpoint devices. So, we have had no concerns in regards to security, because of these policies, features, and security are inherently built into Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are a part in our business continuity strategies: 100 percent. With the agility that it provides, it is able to connect to whatever resource locations are out there, whether it be Azure, AWS, or on-prem. It has been super critical in allowing us to build out that business continuity strategy now. Over the course of the last year, we have built out our business continuity strategy a great deal. What that looks like is that we still manage everything through our central Citrix Cloud service, but our resources are equally split between two of our on-prem data centers, Active-Active. So, we have an Active-Active Citrix strategy in place today. Being able to build two to three years down has really been a huge value to my organization, ensuring that whatever happens out there, we will be able to keep the lights on and keep people working.

Overall, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are highly agile and supported on pretty much whichever platform that you're on. So, the features of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops that we find most valuable in my organization overall are the agility, where we can deploy Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops at my organization. We have resources in Azure, primarily, but we also have resources in AWS and on-prem. We have all kinds of different operating systems as well. We have users who need to access applications on sort of a one-off basis. We also have users who need to access full-blown desktops that live within our data center, either in Azure or on-prem. Just having the ability to serve all those use cases and needs by using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is absolutely critical. 

Another thing that we really enjoy about it is the fact that we're in Citrix Cloud. Using the service within Citrix Cloud really gives us the ability to not worry about the infrastructure components, because it is a software as a service methodology. Citrix really worries about what those updates look like and ensures that the uptime is as high as possible. This allows my team to focus on the high value items, which is the end user, end user security, and user experience. I think having Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as a service is really critical for us to do what we need to do and really focus on the things that are important to us as an organization, and we were able to do that quickly, rapidly, seamlessly, and without any user disruption.

When COVID-19 happened and other companies were faced with sending their workforces home, it was very quickly recognized that organizations, certainly in the city where I live, who weren't using Citrix technologies were really struggling with having their folks work from home. However, it has been widely touted within my organization, when we sent everyone home, there were no disruptions whatsoever. We were able to quickly and seamlessly build out and up our environment to suit the company's needs. All of those things have been of super high value, allowing our company to operate.

The third thing that we find absolutely valuable and critical are the Analytics. Citrix has been maturing their Analytics platform over time. It is in a mature state now where we are able to highlight any user's pain points around user experience, security issues/vulnerabilities or bad actors, and security scenario concerns that might be out there. This has been very important for us, as it allows us to get that data into the hands of the right teams so they can action it as quickly as possible. This way, we can offer a safe, secure, highly capable user experience.

We use Citrix ADC. Currently, that is where all of the traffic flows in for us. Anybody connecting to Citrix today flows in through a Citrix ADC environment. Through that, we are able to monitor all the traffic, where they are coming from, and how often they come through. So, we have our security analytics tools that tie into that information quite tightly. Therefore, any bad actors or anomalies get quickly identified, then they get quickly actioned by our operational team as soon as IT security makes us aware of them.

We also use Remote PC Access, which has been a huge bonus for us. It is number one from a security perspective. Our employees can sort of connect through to our Citrix portal and access desktops sitting in the office in a safe and secure manner. We have segregation and data leakage policies in place, which prevent any data from flowing outside of our organization. So, it is quite secure. If you think of it from a full-on perspective, we have Citrix Cloud users connect into our Citrix portal, then we have Analytics there monitoring for traffic and any anomalies or bad actors flowing through our Citrix Cloud implementation, where we have more analytics baked in where we can identify any sort of scenarios that might pose a danger to my organization. To the actual endpoint itself within our building, there are rich analytics, which are being drawn, and can help inform us around any sort of security concerns that might be going on.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provide everything for us within one integrated platform. With COVID-19 and working from home, it has become clearly apparent that all the use cases currently in my organization have been absolutely met with the services and capabilities that Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provide. This comes down to our users having a better end user experience and us having the capability of having analytics around that we can tweak and optimize as we go. The ease of manageability for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is huge. We are able to get away with doing a much better job at managing that environment now with less people than we did before.

I think improvement around the Analytics piece is super important. There has been a lot of maturity over the last year in that area, though a lot more needs to be done. Also, a lot more of the value of those Analytics needs to be sold to end users. Citrix is working on a lot of things that are ahead of the curve and a lot of organizations aren't quite there yet with implementing those technologies and capabilities. 

Another area that Citrix could improve on, which has nothing to do with the technology, is just selling to its customers, e.g., the importance of taking advantage of those capabilities that are right within the services that they already pay for. 

These are two key areas that Citrix could improve upon and are kind of an extension to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops has gone through some sort of an evolution over the years. Personally, I have been using it for a good 17 to 18 years altogether. In its current iteration of using Citrix Cloud and more of a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as a service, I have been using that for the past five years.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops stability is completely robust. With Citrix Cloud, Citrix manages all the infrastructure, taking care of the availability. They take care of any business continuity worries. We really just need to focus on our core skill sets. It has been fantastic.

In terms of scalability, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops have a lot of technologies baked in there that allow an organization to scale up or down, as required. Further, leveraging Azure for scalability has added value to our organization. For example, pre-COVID-19, we had very few resources in Azure. We had some Virtual Desktops and no application servers. When COVID-19 came along, we knew people were going to be home. We knew that we had to ramp up very quickly. We fully leveraged MCS to be able to scale. Being able to take a single image and build 400,000 Virtual Desktops, all within minutes, was second to none in terms of any other technology out there that we could have used. The scalability to be able to do that in Azure, where we really don't have to worry about storage and compute power because Microsoft does that for us, was fantastic. It was almost like giving our environments steroids. It has been amazing in terms of that scalability. Now, as people start coming back to the office, we can just as quickly scale down so the compute and resource costs in Azure aren't so great anymore.

We have really leveraged Smart Tools to be able to scale up and down. They let us see what the cost looks like, because that is always a consideration. An organization always wants to be able to build the right amount of resources to serve our end users needs, but not more than what is actually needed, because that will just cost an organization more money. The Analytics, Smart Tools, and Machine Creation Services are allowed to do all of these things in a transparent way as well as scale up and down very quickly.

The technical support has been fantastic. We have the ability to call into our Citrix technical support folks and create tickets within the Citrix Cloud console. The ease of creating tickets has been great. The support that we have been given around issues ranging from very small to very large issues has been fantastic. That support has been even more motivated by our account rep who lives in the city that we are at and we have a good rapport with, as well as our sales engineer. Between the partnership of our account rep, sales engineer, and the IT supports folks, we have had a great experience. It is something that we never hesitate to utilize. They have been great consultants whenever we have had to ask general questions. They have been great troubleshooters whenever we have had minor or major issues. Across the board, it has been really great. We are super happy with the support.

We had a previous iteration of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, which was a XenDesktop farm. We have just continued to grow with Citrix over the years as Citrix evolved. 

We have tried VPN solutions and Microsoft Remote Desktop, but none have provided the agility, robustness, and stability that we have needed to give our end users when it comes to doing their core functions.

In terms of security, VPN definitely raises some eyebrows. You have endpoints out in the wild at people's homes and cafes utilizing a VPN connection that is a full tunnel into our data center. So, if that device becomes compromised, our data center can rightly become compromised. That was a huge concern for us. That is what Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provide for us: the segregation between our corporate data and the endpoint device. 

Remote Desktop uses RD Protocols, which are not nearly as mature as the protocols that Citrix uses. What we are seeing are stability issues, particularly during high latency and connections. We see jittering when it comes to videos. We just don't have that robustness when it comes to the connectivity that we do with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. So, in my experience with other organizations as well, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is just a really mature product that has been evolved over many years and continues to evolve. Citrix tends to always go back to those core capabilities, which have been super key for organizations like mine to be able to do as well as we can in such a distributed workforce.

The initial setup is completely straightforward. We are in a Citrix Cloud environment, and that means that Citrix manages the entire bulk of the infrastructure components of our Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops farm. On-prem, what my folks really need to manage, are those high level things within the service of Citrix Cloud, like which apps get installed on which desktops and how we deploy absent servers. This is pretty high level stuff. There are just some servers that act as connectors to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service, which are on-prem and in our Azure tenant that just allow that connectivity to Citrix Cloud. There is no maintenance whatsoever; they're evergreen. They get updated all the time. We basically set it and forget it when it comes to the Citrix connectors.

Because Citrix Cloud supports any kind of operating system out there, all we really need is an agent running on each of the endpoints, then that's it. We run the agent and make sure it is kept up-to-date. On the endpoints, we make sure that the agents are connecting to our Cloud Connectors. Then, Citrix basically does makes sure that infrastructure is up, running, and available.

For the deployment, not much staff at all was required. I was the main technical lead when it came to the deployment. Citrix Consulting services just needed some inputs that were pretty specific to the organization itself. Those types of inputs included what the environment looks like, service accounts, etc. That low down deep technical stuff is really specific to each organization. 

Citrix Consulting services did everything else. They did the solution design and the implementation itself. They did the additional training with additional individuals, so it was an easy implementation from my organization's perspective. There was not much overhead at all. That's why we go to Citrix time and time again for these implementations.

When you are in my position as a leader, finding a technology, such as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, that you believe in, which does a great job as well as will be there for whatever future plans your organization has, that is super key. You have to keep selling that technology and make sure it has a footprint within your organization as much as possible, because that's technology you can rely on when the time comes and everybody has to work from home, or things happen around natural disasters. So, it is super critical.

Our deployment took probably three months altogether, not very long at all. For Citrix Cloud, we had Citrix Consulting services come in and do that for us. We have always been super happy with Citrix Consulting services. They have such fantastic people. They have such huge talent on their bench. They help organizations, such as ours, do what we need to do in the Citrix space. So, we had them come in, and for three months, they implemented the product. It was super straightforward. Everything was documented. 

When it came time to hand that service off to our operational staff, it was super easy. The overhead of managing Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is way less than it was when we had our on-prem farm with Citrix. So, we are super happy with the ease of manageability and the implementation that took place as well as the professionalism and maturity of that implementation. Things went super smoothly, and we couldn't have been happier.

It has absolutely saved the organization money. If you think of just overall support of having all that support and manageability within a single pane of glass, that has been super critical. We have two people who manage the workloads of 2,000 people working from home, and that's critical and super key. That saves us time, effort, and money. With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops being so mature around being centrally-managed, we are able to send people home and not need to have any consideration for what devices that we need to send home with them. Whatever device they have on their desk, they can take with them. We know what will be fully supported when they try to connect to our Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service when they get home. That has also saved us a lot of time, money, and support.

I just can see the tremendous value that it has given us. The stability that the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops has given people to be able to keep up their productivity and mitigate their downtime. In theory, I can see it with my own eyes every day, but we haven't actually crunched those numbers. That would be something I would be very interested to see.

In terms of pricing with the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, I think it has gotten better over the years. Citrix has found more dynamic ways to be able to revive licensing models that fit many different scenarios that organizations have. We have been able to evolve our own licensing over the years to accommodate our situations between concurrent versus user device licenses. Now, when we move into the Citrix Workspace realm, we definitely have some awesome options there. 

I think Citrix is always willing to negotiate different models. They try to offer their clients flexible options to license their products. We have been very happy with the way that our licensing has worked out with Citrix.

For anyone who is thinking about getting into Virtual Apps and Desktops and utilizing that in their organization, I would really start thinking about what use cases would make the most sense. In the past, Citrix has been very heavily focused on the remote worker. So, at other organizations that I've worked with, we've had people distributed in the field: working in mines, the fields, and at oil and gas plants. Having that centralized management for people who are working out in the field is a critical use case. Think about the workers in your organization who meet that use case and it is a no-brainer in terms of trying out the technology with them. There are other use cases as well, like developers and other business units who may require a second or third desktop for testing and development work outside of their primary machine that may be managed by their organization.

Often organizations have third-party contractors who come in and do work for that organization. Having that segregation of data between what is in the data center and what is on the endpoint is critical when third-party contractors come in with their own company's laptops and want to do work for your organization. Having the ability to ramp up or down and give or take away access very quickly without a worry for security and data leakage is another no-brainer use case. 

It all comes back to use cases and which ones you start implementing. As organizations get more used to this technology, they will see the true value in it build very quickly.

When you look at this pandemic, all our use cases had to start using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops in my organization. They did this without any downtime whatsoever. That has been super key. Another critical use case that people don't often think about that you're going to need to be ready for is a natural disaster that may hit your company where people can't work from that office anymore. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provide that readiness for you right out of the gate.

We do have the capability today to provide intelligent analytics for proactive detection of malicious user behaviors. However, it's not a capability that we're utilizing a great deal. Over the next year, that's certainly something that we're going to be building more into our strategy. I think that's the real critical thing when it comes to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops; it's not a stagnant type of technology. Citrix invests a lot of development in maturing this product and building it out along with more capabilities. So, a lot of companies, like ours, are playing catch up with a lot of these capabilities. Knowing that Citrix is putting research and development in their product as much as they are and we have those capabilities, that barrier is non-existent when it comes to the technology. This is really critical because now we are able to plan and implement those types of strategies in a timeline that is best for us, because we know that the technology will be there to serve that.

We do have a posturing policy in place today that does a sort of loose assessment of what the endpoint looks like, providing access accordingly. That posturing is done at the Citrix ADC level. The engine that does that has been pretty important in allowing us to ensure that only those devices that we allow into our organization get into our organization and get access to only the resources that we allow them to get access to.

Admittedly, we haven't really gotten too far into the behaviour analytics capability at my organization. I do see it as supercritical. It is a capability that we want to build into our solution over the next year, but it's not something that we are using right now. From what I have seen, it will serve all of our needs. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, its analytics, and security policies will allow us to quickly identify any anomalies in an automated type of fashion using AI, which will allow the technology to act upon those anomalies without any human intervention. I think that's key. Whenever you see huge outbreaks in vulnerabilities at organizations, it always tends to come down to that human intervention and the delay in an actual human doing that analytics themselves by assessing and acting. Whereas, Citrix technologies, within the Virtual Apps and Desktops space, have those capabilities already automated. That will be really important when my organization moves to implementing this methodology in the coming year. 

Another capability that we could be using that we're not currently today is the solution’s automated analytics. The infrastructure has been maturing at my organization, and we are moving into a place where we can utilize these technologies and capabilities. Right now, we're not really using it, but I do recognize its value and that's something that my organization will definitely be looking at over the next year.

In terms of identifying malicious actors within my organization, we have only implemented it and are using a very tertiary level. However, as my organization matures more than moving into those types of capabilities over the next year, that is definitely something else that we'll be able to take advantage of.

Our Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment is very well-organized. About 98 percent of our organization currently relies on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to keep the lights on and our business going. As the situation evolves with COVID-19 and work from home programs, where some people come into the office and some people continue working from home on an ongoing basis, we will continue to leverage these technologies. I think we are going to continue to evolve the technologies that Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops use as we go. As an organization, we have serious eyes on Citrix Workspace. In the near, if we can use the Citrix Workspace and all its additional capabilities in conjunction with Virtual Apps and Desktops, I see that as a natural evolution of our Citrix environment. That will mean a better, more secure experience for the end-user community and organization as a whole.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Virtual Apps and Desktops is how truly dynamic and scalable it is. COVID-19 and working from home has really put that environment and technology to the test, putting everyone to the test. It has allowed us to scale up as our user base has scaled up. The licensing model has allowed us to have that flexibility to scale up as needed. We have had a very small learning curve, as people have just picked up on the technology. They know exactly what to do because it has been very intuitive in that regard.

I would probably rate this solution between an eight and nine (out of 10). That rating would certainly be way above and beyond any other remote technologies that I have used in the past.

For virtual desktops, like Windows 10 or Windows 7, we primarily use the solution to offer some customized applications to the users. 

Some of the basic applications, like Windows applications, are being used across all VDIs. 

The usage depends on the specific customer. They decide what applications they want to have in their VDI. We have certain items as far as their requirements, and we just manage the infrastructure in the background.

Citrix tends to have the most capabilities surrounding desktops.

The application virtualization is very, very good.

The customer is always looking for a unified solution. They need a single place where everything can be managed from while using a web application. With Citrix's system, there's an administrative tool and a helpdesk tool. Those two tools are very different, and the Citrix administrative tool is not meant for web-based use. It's in a heavy application. If they could build it into their web-based applications, that would be ideal. That way, administrators can log in from anywhere on any browser and they can just manage the environment in the background. 

Citrix does not have an in depth assessment tool. Some customers ask for components in Citrix that can give information around the hypervisor's resources or in-depth metrics of the hypervisor's site. There is a free tool from Citrix, however, it does not give you the deeper information of the other components like hypervisor or the OS or the storage, or downloads in the network. Those are the limitations of that particular tool right now. We might need to use a third party tool to gain that information. 

If Citrix can develop something which can have more reach towards the backend infrastructure, other components of the Citrix environment, that would be ideal. 

We've most likely been using the solution for over eight years at this point.

Citrix is one of the companies that is delivering virtual apps and desktops in a big way. They are mature enough to understand the level of stability required and deliver it. 

Now, they are moving towards the cloud and offering everything as a service. The redundancy part is already taken care of by the company. 

We have many components and have controlled redundancies. From the end-user side, a user won't see any disruption in the services. That's due to the fact that the infrastructure in the background is highly available. Elasticity is also introduced. We're always building provisioning desktops on-demand and shutting the machines that are not in demand. 

We have certain policies defined in the infrastructure in the background, which can enable our administrators to utilize the resources as they need them. Therefore, it's quite stable.

We use this solution ourselves in our own organization and have a 60,000-70,000 userbase currently. We have more than 40 customers within the virtual workspace. Most are medium-sized entities. A few have 20,000-40,000 users. We'll be adding another client in healthcare that has about 20,000 desktops.

Scalability is not an issue. You can scale up to any number. There's only the requirement of adding the infrastructure and building that horizontally. You'll need to set up the different components horizontally. For example, if we have a 10,000 user base, then we can probably have 10 master servers. If the user base is around 40,000, then we can double the master servers so that they can take up the load.

We often contact technical support.

They are very engaged, whenever we have an issue. They are very helpful. Most of the time, whenever we run into an issue where we need to reach out to Citrix they are available to us.

We do not support only Citrix. We also support the backend infrastructure and hosting infrastructure that are also Citrix products. If it's tied to another product, such as Microsoft, they'll work together to resolve whatever the issue is. 

We haven't found any difficulty in working with them. It's rare that we'd need to reach out to other vendors as well as Citrix (usually once in a quarter), however, if it happens, we know Citrix will do what they can to work with all parties.

We do not exclusively work with Citrix. It's much more high-end than other services, however, we do also offer, for example, VMware and Horizon.

The initial setup is very simple currently. Earlier we used to install many components separately. Now, we have a basic software installation setup. We can build the environment in a few hours. It does not take much time now. Earlier, we used to have to secure the servers, for example. It is all virtualized. One administrator can build the environment from scratch and in a very short period of time. It's not complex now. Earlier it was, but not anymore.

The deployment time depends on the sizing of the environment. If the customer is looking for only 500 desktops, it takes one day to build everything. If there is planning involved, and there are some different components or key bits and pieces that the administrator needs to collect, it might take a bit longer.

If it is in a scalable environment that's sized, for example, at 1,000, 10,000, or 20,000, it will definitely take time. This is due to the fact that we need to choose the appropriate technology for the background. We need to figure out if the customer's willing to have a provision desktop, basically. That all depends on what the customer size is and what the customer requirements are.

We also offer managed services, so we can help our clients manage everything once the solution is fully deployed.

Our team can help implement the solution for our clients. That said, I don't handle the process directly myself.

Citrix is competitive, however, at the same time, they give great service. VMware, Horizon, or other VDI solutions may be cheaper. That said, they do not have the same capability that Citrix has. 

We offer other VDI solutions like Microsoft WVDs and the VMware's Horizon, that are on the cheaper side. It's up to the customer, what they want to do. If they want to have premium services, we will host their VDIs on Citrix system components only. That will give them better features and better capabilities or maybe less frustration on the user experience side.

We offer cloud and managed services offerings as well as environments hosted on our data center. We have a variety of options and therefore can offer a variety of prices according to what they need/want.

We're currently using the latest version of the solution.

While we mostly work with on-premises deployments, we also occasionally handle cloud deployments as well. 

We have our internal Cloud offering. Form there, we have a managed data center and within our company's premises, the customers are just subscribing to services based on their need for virtual desktops.

I would recommend the product. It's an industry leader in the VDI environment. Nobody can match their capabilities right now.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. If they had better capability testing, I might rate it higher.

I use the tool to connect to the other apps of the company.

The tool helps me to connect with some apps of our company and resolve the tickets.

I have to re-enter my user password when I am not using the tool for some time around ten minutes. I want to also improve the need to download other Citrix apps.

I have used the solution for two weeks.

I would rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten. The tool’s download time is slow.

I would rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten.

The solution’s setup is simple.

I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

Citrix is used by many organizations to make it possible to streamline the way different developers work together from different locations. It is able to do this using a low bandwidth. Essentially it is used for remote application delivery. 

Citrix's functionality depends on you having access to Microsoft Azure. Microsoft offers a broad range of features and solutions. Overall, it may make sense for some users to move all their services to Microsoft services. The main challenge is that you need to have a Microsoft Azure subscription. 

This solution could be improved by adding features for authentication. 

I have been using this solution for 10 years. 

This is a stable solution, however, this stability can be impacted by networking changes. Citrix has developed its own in-house monitoring tool that assists in this regard. Security wise, they have lots of features that you can use for two factor authentication along with your password or biometrics.

This is a scalable solution. Citrix is able to increase its capacity and functionalities based on demand for both on-prem or cloud-based scenarios. 

The customer support team is responsive when we contact them. Citrix runs on top of Windows so it is important to first figure out whether the challenge you have is Windows or Citrix related. There is an option to pay for support from Citrix and this is based on whether you are a gold or premium customer. They have a dedicated technical team and technical relationship manager who will engage with your environment and provide suggestion. They also offer professional services for deployment and configurations.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward but this may differ based on specific scenarios. This solution needs to be integrated with directory infrastructure and in accordance with basic requirements. The setup is simpler for smaller environment and more complex for larger environments that need integration with other cloud infrastructure. 

You have to install a cloud connector for on-prem environments that use separate Windows servers. In future, Citrix are planning to bypass that cloud connection. 

They offer licensing per user.  From time to time, they give discounts. Because it's a hybrid model, you can deploy some portion of it on cloud and some portion your on-prem. 

This is an expensive solution but the cost can be brought down by discount bargaining based on the volume of licenses you are purchasing. 

I would advise others to evaluate whether to use the Citrix VDI based on all the different applications you have in your environment. You should specifically consider those applications which are cloud based and those which are on-premise as well as where your data is kept. This will determine the complexity of adding Citrix. 

You need consider what infrastructure is required for an in-house solution and how will your team manage and monitor updates. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

If you have a desktop, laptop, or device that can be distributed to end users, to any kind of inconsistency in the institution, we deploy the solution so that anybody can get whatever resource is required. It helps ensure access. It makes it easy for us to give storage, memory, RAM, or processor resources without anything affecting their day-to-day activity. It makes it simple and easy for our institution to provide the kind of activity to the users.

The product is ideal for sharing an application for different resources. For instance, let's say we have a Microsoft Office product and want to share the Microsoft Office product with everyone simultaneously. That can easily be done. 

With this product, everyone can have a similar kind of desktop environment. So it's a virtual environment, the desktop environment. They can do whatever they need in that environment, and different kinds of users can access different kinds of applications. 

The product is scalable. 

If there are connectivity issues, there are stability issues. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable and reliable. However, it depends on the network infrastructure. If we have a stable network infrastructure, then it's stable. That said, if the infrastructure is not stable, I don't recommend this product. If there is an interruption, it might not actually be available to the user, which could cause issues.

The solution is scalable. 

Right now, we have 1,100 virtual workspaces, and we are planning to add 1,500 more. 

We do not use a different type of service right now. 

In terms of handling the setup process, we need planning since it is a bit complex. We need to know the infrastructure itself. The hardware resources can also be a bit expensive, and the licensing might also depend on the number of users that the organization has. Therefore, it is a bit expensive, the initial deployment. The cost of RAM after the deployment is much less.

It needs a proper professional to deploy everything. It also requires the engagement of Citrix. Three to six months is enough to deploy it as the hardware might first actually need to be available. Still, once you have that resource, deploying Citrix also might take additional time.

While internally, it can be managed by an in-house staff, the deployment cannot. It requires proper capacity building to do even the deployment. It is a little bit challenging, so I recommend the setup be done by the consultant. 

The initial setup requires a specific supplier or consultant to handle everything. It can't be done in-house.

In January 2020 they changed the licensing scheme and they're also changing the on-prem licensing scheme to be subscription-based as well. It can be tricky. I don't know why they did that. Maybe it's the marketing strategy. I don't know. The subscription is for three years or five years. If you procure three years subscription, you can use the license, after three years, they'll block it, which can be a challenge if you aren't paying attention to when licensing renewals are due. 

We last updated about a year ago. We are on the 2021 version.

I recommend the solution, however, it depends on the organization's use case. Let's say if that organization needs to share the resource equally through the users or staff they have, then I recommend it. 

I'd rate it nine out of ten.