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

I need it to be able to access internal resources and work from a secure environment, wherever I am based. Frankly, security is my only concern.

I use the on-premises desktop virtualization and Remote PC Access. 

I am using it for personal use.

The only reason why I use it is I may need to access my files from anywhere that I am and where I cannot install a VPN to my place or anything else. I have managed to secure it enough to know that my files will always be accessible no matter where I am. I wouldn't use it otherwise.

I perform security tests with external providers.

The only thing that is really important for me is being able to connect from wherever I am. It is important for me because sometimes I am in places where there are not enough safe conditions to be able to work safely, in terms of security and confidentiality of my data. Being able to access internal resources from a secure platform allows me to work without fearing that my data has been stolen.

The NetScaler Gateway is very customizable. However, it is also a mess in a sense that you can't find what you want or where it's supposed to be. You are supposed to navigate dozens of manuals to find the right one. It is not well-organized. Then, it becomes messy when we talk about configuration.

Six years now.

I would rate the user experience when using the solution’s technology remotely as an eight out of 10, because it is normally quick and stable enough. The way it works, it may not be perfect, which is why I don't think it gets a nine out of 10, but it is stable enough to allow me to work. That is what counts in the end.

Since I use one machine, I don't need to worry about scalability, high availability, etc. I just have it up when I need it.

When I needed support for a couple of things, three people intervened. Each time, three people gave me a different answer. In the end, they did not manage to give the right answer. At a certain point, they stopped replying. That is no more than a one out of 10. If I could give a zero, I would give a zero.

I am using both Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and VMware Horizon, so I am not really switching to Citrix. 

I prefer Citrix because it is faster and the interface is cleaner. The text is crispier. It looks like a pumped up version of VMware Horizon desktops.

The VDIs are very easy to set up. 

The NetScaler Gateway is very complex to set up, if you want to get to the right level of security. If you just want to set it up and make it run, then it is easy and takes 30 seconds, but it doesn't do anything. It is crap. If you want to really set it up, it is very complex.

The primary steps are pretty much forced. You install the Director and Studio, then you install the deploy machine, which makes it run. I'm not an enterprise, so I don't need to worry about all the preplanning. I just deploy machines and provide some cyberware. I just put it on the machine and let it run. In this case, that is very good. It allows you to do this with no real proper pre-thinking about how many machines you need to deploy, etc. 

To set it up as I wanted, it took me one month. However, I don't do that as a job. I just did it as a hobby or for personal reasons, which are not my job. Then, I worked on it when I had the time, not all day. 

Where Citrix really needs to improve is in their support and in the way that they manage their licenses. Everything else comes second because if I'm not in a position where I can get proper support or manage my own licenses in an easy way, then it is pointless. Today, I am at a point where I may not be able to use Citrix anymore because they want to take away some of the licenses that I bought, pretending they are not valid anymore. That is frankly unacceptable. If they don't solve this, everything comes second because I cannot use my product.

On a scale from zero to 10, I would rate pricing a zero. They are trying to take away licenses that I bought because they say they are not valid anymore, even if they are stated as permanent. On the site, they are characterized as permanent. They insist this is an evaluation version that I'm not allowed to use as permanent, which means I will probably be in a position where I can't work anymore. So, their licensing system is bad. The fact that I cannot relocate my licenses alone, but I have to go through and use their support center makes it even worse.

I do not know other vendors aside from VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft Hyper-V, which I am using as well.

• VMware is easy to set up as a pro and more cluttered as a con. 
• Citrix, as a pro, is very quick. As a con, their support in the licensing system is so bad that I may leave it very quickly. 
• Hyper-V is well-integrated as a pro. I just started working on Hyper-V so I cannot give any real con yet because I'm not yet at that stage. I'm still figuring out how it works. I have virtual machines running on Hyper-V, but it is really too early to comment on this solution.

Go for VMware. Seriously, they are the same thing. 

I would rate the solution as a two (out of 10). I cannot give an eight or nine (out of 10) to a solution that works well if the provider does not put me in a position where I can use it.

Make sure that you have data sources in-house to manage every problem because support may be useless. Make sure that you discuss well in advance and get written proof of what you are buying from Citrix, because there lies a risk not being able to work on your solution anymore from one day to another.

We are using Citrix Workspace for the people who are roaming employees, those who rarely come to the office and access applications and data from outside the office.

Citrix Workspace has benefited organizations from the security extension after implementing it.

The most valuable feature of Citrix Workspace is its security.

The Citrix Workspace interface could improve. Additionally, if they are able to provide a mobile application

I have been using Citrix Workspace for over six years.

Citrix Workspace is quite a stable solution provided it is implemented as part of best practices provided by Citrix Workspace. If any of the organizations are not following the best practices, they are bound to have, challenges with regard to stability. 

Citrix Workspace can be scalable. However, the scalability of the solution depends on how it has been implemented. If the implementation is done, keeping scalability in mind, it would be scalable. If scalability has not been considered at the time of implementing the solution, then any organization is going to find it difficult to scale.

We have approximately 100 users using Citrix Workspace in my organization.

My experience with the support from Citrix Workspace mix and match experience. Earlier, it used to be a good experience, but over a period of time, there have been a lot of changes within Citrix.

I rate the support from  Citrix Workspace a four out of five.

The initial setup of Citrix Workspace is a bit of a complex process, which should be made easier in the future. If somebody's looking to extend the reach of this solution, then the implementation of this has to be super easy. It should be very easy that would make somebody wants to use Citrix Workspace on a regular basis for their personal use. Security is something that is and is going to be a big concern for everybody down the line.

The length of time it takes to implement Citrix Workspace depends on how complex the environment is. If it is a project with very minimum applications to be published through the Citrix Workspace, then it can take approximately 15 days to one month to complete. 

If it is a complex environment where there are multiple applications posted on different platforms with multiple application stacks, that may take up to three months time or even more than that in some cases.

The implementation was done in-house. 

Citrix Workspace doesn't acquire any specific maintenance, but if we want to reduce the maintenance overhead from the organization's point of view, to do that, we can try to make it easy for end-user to use it, such as not raising tickets to IT teams to sort out. They should be able to resolve their issue. In most of the cases, I have seen that the issues are related to end-user only.

The price of the solution could be less expensive. There are different versions to their solution and the price keeps increasing.

If someone is trying to enable their employees to work from anywhere without compromising security, I would recommend a Citrix Workspace.

I rate Citrix Workspace an eight out of ten.

Everything requires improvement, nothing is perfect. Everyone should consider improvement.

Citrix Workspace can be deployed in the cloud and on-premise.

Citrix Workspace can present desktop applications with ease, in an efficient and secure manner. The performance is good, it is a great piece of software.

Citrix Workspace can improve by being more secure, but this would apply to any solution not only Citrix Workspace.

There are times when the Citrix client is updated with a poor release. The update can effectively knock out aspects that were working previously. You can go one step forward, but two steps back. They will go through a period of having some very good software releases and then they will stop completely. It will take a couple more releases to get back everything that was negatively impacted. 

I have used Citrix Workspace within the last 12 months.

The solution is stable.

Citrix Workspace is scalable.

I have not had to contact the support from Citrix Workspace.

The initial setup is straightforward and simple.

The licensing of Citrix Workspace is worth it. However, it is expensive. Citrix is probably more competitive now than VMware, but it is still a costly solution.

I have evaluated VMware.

My advice to others is the initial installation is always straightforward, it's the second phase that you need a lot of good assistance or a lot of assistance to get it working right or working well. If you go into it thinking you can learn as you go, it's not that kind of solution. It is similar to VMware. The whole element about it is that installing the solution is easy and getting things up and running is not a problem, but getting it to work well in the environment requires a lot of expertise and you need to pay the money to get that to work well.

I rate Citrix Workspace a ten out of ten.

One of the things we wanted to achieve was the ability to work from home and have the same environment. We use the application virtualization capabilities, the on-premise desktop virtualization, and the cloud-hosted desktop virtualization.

A lot of people are going to a hybrid working model and they can work in the same environment, whether they're at home or in the office. They're able to work efficiently.

Security is also of critical importance. It provides a very secure environment with several security features that can be implemented. We are an IT infrastructure company, so infrastructure passwords are very critical. It provides us with a tremendous amount of security, which is very valuable.

Citrix also simplifies adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance.

The most valuable feature is the desktop experience so that users don't see much difference between the remote desktop and the local desktop. Their files remain the same, so it's much easier to work from different locations. We use it for laptops and desktops only, but I believe it has the flexibility to be used on any device. If the desktop experience is good, the employees are happier. They are able to do what they want to do.

It also provides virtualization for high-end graphics so that they can be displayed. AutoCAD can be done on Citrix. The graphics are very good.

We also like the security features it provides.

It would help if it were a little simpler. It's a bit complicated and we have hired Citrix administrators. But it's a good solution.

We have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for about two and half months.

We have about 400 people and we have implemented it for about 130 people. We're implementing it for the other employees as well.

We went with Citrix because of its security and the user experience.

Deployment and management are not easy, but because we are an IT company, we are able to do it. We provide a virtual desktop service to our customers, so Citrix fits into our business model. You have to set up all the Citrix components, drivers, and Netscaler. You need to deploy three to four servers for a basic Citrix setup, as well as servers that give the remote desktop to your users.

If you have Citrix experts, deployment should happen in a month's time. But if you don't have experts, it can take more time. Now that we have the expertise in managing Citrix on the cloud, the time it takes to get our customers on board and into the service that we are providing to them with Citrix, depends on them. We can get them on board very quickly because now we know what to do and how to do it.

We haven't embraced thin clients or low-cost device computing yet. We were of two minds about whether to take full laptops or thin clients for access while working from home. We are experimenting with thin clients now, and the experience has been positive, but until now we have used only laptops. We are going to further test thin clients and then we'll be giving them to some of our users.

I primarily was in charge of implementation and support. The solution itself was primarily used for remote access.

The solution was perfect for expanding the environment to host more remote access users during the pandemic.

The ability to allow users to have remote access is the product's most valuable aspect.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. 

The solution scales well.

For the most part, overall stability is what you would expect.

The user profiles could use some improvement. They could use more stability and more functionality as well as user profile redirection.

I've used the solution since 2002 across several organizations. I have a lot of experience with the product as I've used it for quite a while at this point. I've used the solution within the last 12 months, however, for the contract I have now, I am not using it.

The user profiles could be more stable. 

The stability in general is pretty good. It is one of the numerous virtualization applications that have the same reliability as all the others; there's nothing different.

The scalability of the product is quite good and you can expand it if you need to.

It can expand into a larger organization and into an enterprise infrastructure from on-premise to a cloud environment.

I've been in touch with Citrix technical support and I would describe them as sufficient. They are okay in terms of the level of service they provide. 

It's my understanding that the company on my last project did not use a different solution before Citrix.

The initial setup was not overly complex or difficult. It was very simple and quite straightforward. Overall, it's a solution that is easy to implement and maintain. 

The initial deployment only took a few hours and maintenance is pretty minimal in terms of the time required. 

My strategy was to implement it to the required specifications. 

We had four people who handled the last implementation I did. 

Maintenance requires tasks such as image updates, patching, and support.

We help deploy the solution to our clients. We are able to handle any implementations. We don't work directly with Citrix, however, we do work with another third-party company. The experience we had with the company, overall, was positive. 

While I was on the project, I did not see an ROI.

We had a yearly license and we did named instances which I didn't like, due to the fact that they took away the concurrent. I tend to prefer concurrent as you don't get duplications.

The purchase price was around $300,000 USD and then the maintenance fees were 20%. There are no other additional fees.

I don't have any knowledge of the company evaluating anything before choosing Citrix. 

Our organization does not have a business relationship with Citrix. 

I cannot recall the exact version number I last used. It might have been 2106, however, I'm not sure. It was likely the latest version of the product.

I would advise those considering the solution to buy a maintenance contract alongside the solution. 

What I've learned, not so much from Citrix, but all of the virtualization applications is no matter how well your system runs, somebody will ditch. You need to be prepared for that.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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 use Citrix Workspace to login into our system.

We have several users and there are standards in the installation process because of the security. They have found that various systems with standard installations, restricting users to go ahead and install on their own.

Everything is managed through the infrastructure. ServiceNow is used for the CCM.

Everything is automated machine creations and installations. They take care of the machines with regular updates on weekends.

Everything is automated here, and there is no manual intervention for setting up any system if a new user is hired.

The feature that I like is that it is fast. For example, if I am new to the company, setting up systems can take up a lot of time, but, having standard automation in place allows this user to have the same set of software installed on his or her machine.

The only area that takes some time is that it requires us to get the approval. Once the approval is given, the system with everything is installed as a prerequisite.

Because it's a prerequisite, it's a standard installation in all the systems, there are no discrepancies because everything is standard, it's automated. If I am using a particular version, it will be the same version in my colleague's system.

It's very easy.

Performance is an area that can be improved. The meetings that use Skype in Workspace will lag when they run long or we screen share. At times, it is slow when there are multiple users on the server.

When it lags, we restart it to get it resolved. If multiple users are using a single server it will lag. 

The lag when using Skype or Screen Sharing with multiple users needs to improve, as it makes it difficult for us to continue when we have to restart the system. 

I have been using Citrix Workspace for almost one year.

The solution is stable, however, there are version discrepancies. For example, a new version of Citrix has become available and I am using the old version of Citrix the new version is not compatible with the Media version, which creates problems when using Skype or any video meeting.

Lag is something that we observe frequently, but it can be resolved because we have a guideline page that shows us the versions that should be compatible with our systems or Windows Operating System, and the Media Version, which is the Citrix HDX Realtime Media Version, should also be compatible with the Citrix Workstation that we are using. If both are good your system will work well.

It's a scalable solution and everyone in the organization uses it. We have more than 15,000 users.

We plan to continue to use Citrix Workspace.

I do not have experience with technical support. I have a PoC team that deals with them. They are quick to resolve issues.

We just need to create a ticket and ask for support.

Ther support is good and they are quick to respond and resolve issues.

Previously, we used A3 Machine, which was replaced by Citrix Workspace.

It is easy to install. There is a link provided on our homepage for login.

We just need to install it and restart the system.

It is very fast. It took half an hour or so.

Azure Desktop has been released and we will be using this along with Citrix Workspace. When we want to use something, we need to first have Citrix Workspace.

I have Citrix Workspace and on top of that, I can use Microsoft Azure Desktop, which may allow me to program in that machine. Citrix Workspace is the base and it works fine with most of our products.

Definitely, I would recommend Citrix Workspace to others who are interested in using it. It's very handy, portable, fast, and easy to install. Also, it is the standard amongst all users.

I would encourage everybody to use Citrix Workspace.

We are quite satisfied. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

In the beginning, the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops was designed for our COVID-19 business continuity plan. We use a lot of Citrix Desktops (for around 600 people). The desktop was built for out of office work, whitelisting clients, for all work done with a personal computer, and for the business continuity in a white room with dedicated computers. Today, we have changed the total design using enterprise laptops for everybody, so the desktop is gone and we only publish applications for end users.

The profile between the Citrix published applications and the broker profile on the laptop is permitted to use the same profile and the same settings for the user in Citrix and the laptop. It is a mix of both environments.

We are deployed in two parts: Belgium and Luxembourg. In Belgium, we have around 20 sessions concurrently, which are 100 percent deployed on-premise. In Luxemburg, we have around 400 sessions concurrently.

Today, we use only Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. In the past, we also used Citrix Gateway to bring Citrix on a government forum or working with a personal computer, though this part is totally void today.

While we use it on-premise, we are using it more and more for cloud applications and infrastructure. Workers run applications on-prem to segregate correctly the access rights. All our tasks are on-premise, which is a positive for our security and the regulatory authority.

There was a scenario where a user built very small films for internal communication on his laptop via the VPN using the NAS file system. It's not the best solution. This takes around 45 minutes. With this use case, we installed all the tools on Citrix. Now, the user can build his film in a maximum of two minutes. It was an incredible improvement for the user. Today, this is the best case of Citrix usage for end user experience, using the full capabilities of the server in the data center.

Our organization supports Zero Trust as a security strategy. However, the Zero Trust strategy in the bank is done via the VPN. Also, all laptops connected out of the bank are via VPN. We don't use the full Citrix landscape to do this today.

For all applications in the bank, we set up Active Directory groups to have access rights. All users can access a lot of applications, but the rights are given one by one for each application. Therefore, it's very centralized at the Active Directory level.

The business continuity plan was 100 percent based on Citrix and the client. Today, it is a little different because everybody has a laptop, but the main applications are still available on Citrix. This offers the more flexible possibilities of managing business continuity plans and performance everywhere for end users.

In Luxembourg, a user can use business applications with Citrix inside the building. Then, outside the building, that user cannot use the business applications because we cut the usage of Citrix.

We can provide tons of applications with different settings, behaviors, and operating systems. It is the same way for the user. Then, we are totally transparent for the user to use a lot of totally different applications, which is the most important part of Citrix today.

Remotely, the user can use his personal computer with a VPN to the bank, as there is not always WiFi. We have seen very low boundaries in some cases. With the Citrix application, we provide very beautiful applications. We are running without a lot of resources in the data center and the user doesn't see it. It's totally transparent for them.

In the bank, a major part of all our applications is Microsoft App-V. If App-V is at end of life, then we need a new technology to replace it. As of today, I haven't seen in Citrix Studio that there is a new technology embedded directly in it to replace App-V.

We have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for more than 10 years. We started with a full complement of Citrix features, but today we only use a small portion of it. This changed over the years. 

The stability of the solution is great. It is not evident to me whether the lack of stability is linked with the new data center, due to a Citrix issue or new component in the new data center. However, in the past, Citrix was very stable. 

In the beginning, we had more than 70 users with only one reboot per week. I have heard that some companies rebooted every day at night. For us, that was not mandatory. The solution has been very stable with the condition that our applications are packaged correctly.

We plan to migrate to the latest LTSR version next year.

The scalability of Citrix is incredible because we use the Provisioning Services (PVS) solution. With this technology, the same image can be streamed to all servers. With this technology, I don't need to install, reinstall, nor repackage it. 

Globally, we have 600 to 700 users with Citrix access in the company. Their roles of Citrix users are private banker, operations, and sales. 

There is not so much support because the solution is very stable. However, we use Citrix ShareFile, and for this, all calls are solved within five hours. Citrix is very good for our usage today, and we haven't had a big issue.

We have been using Citrix for a long time. Building and first implementing Citrix was a little complex. We have a lot of components. However, when you manage all of them correctly, then it's easy. 

The first time, it was a little complicated to build the first images. Today, with versions, this is easy. We built a new image in four hours, which is incredible. Over time, we have improved the function and management of Citrix.

Implementation in the bank was in three steps: 

1. We implemented it in a test environment, like a beta environment, with a beta tester and system engineer to improve the solution and application, then checked everything was working. 
2. In the acceptance environment, we set up all the same settings as production. We asked key users to validate everything: applications and behaviors. 
3. We copied-pasted this environment (if everything was okay) into production for end users and key users. It had totally the same environment with the same behavior. Then, we validated all the environments from acceptance to production directly on the same Citrix environment. 

Acceptance and production are only one big environment where acceptance and production workers cohabit in separate tools and where all users can go into the acceptance or production environments by default. When we validate a new disk or function in a new application, we go to acceptance with just an Active Directory group to validate the solution. This is really great.

In the beginning, we used a partner as an integrator to help us design the Citrix and implement the first part. We have been using a partner for maintenance and upgrades because we don't have the knowledge at this moment about the newest version of Citrix. 

As partners, we used Acidos to build our first version, then we used SecureLink. However, I don't think the Citrix partner aspect of SecureLink's company exists anymore.

We deployed the first bit with our partner. We did this with seven or eight system engineers to build and go through tests. That was the first version. Today, for Belgium and Luxembourg, we have only three system engineers to maintain and publish new applications.

With Citrix, we saved a lot in the past for the business continuity plan. Today, it is not so much, but we still make money because the performance is there.

If you look at cost, then you must look at the number of users that you are covering. If you are only using it for some users, then it is very expensive. However, if you have a massive amount of users, then it begins to be interesting to use Citrix. Because once you are managing thousands of servers with one guy, your maintenance costs decrease per user.

Another major cost is Microsoft because Microsoft Windows costs them. We also need a license for SQL server, Windows Server, and Citrix Remote PC. These are extra costs for the solution that are not covered by the license.

We haven't evaluated similar solutions. We don't have any other solutions for replacing the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop. Therefore, I think we will stay with Citrix for a long time.

We use other tools for analysis, not the Citrix tools and analytics. We don't use the Citrix tools because all our firewalls are not Citrix Firewalls.

All our detection and monitoring are not done via the Citrix environment because we have other tools for that.

There has been a lot of improvement in the application. We use the application for so many different things and areas of security. It is incredible what we can do with Citrix. It provides total transparency for us.

Today, it does not provide the flexibility of being used on any device because we use it on enterprise laptops. However, in the past, users could use their personal computer. It covered a lot of models and brands, and it was totally transparent for us. We only asked, "Please install Citrix receivers," then the rest is transparent for the system engineer. 

It is not clear for this moment if we will increase the usage of Citrix, because we don't know where the user will be working going forward (at the office, home, or another country).

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It's not only Virtual Apps and Desktops. Also, other products that I see from Citrix on the market are good. They look for the best performance solution for the end user.

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.

We deliver mainly desktops to all of our offices, using thin clients. Since we've been working from home during the pandemic, people just use their home computers to access their desktops. We deploy a desktop full of a standard set of applications, and we have a few published applications that are not on a desktop. People access those from that desktop, and some people access them as a published application and not a desktop.

We have people who have laptops and some of them just use one or two applications, so they don't get a full desktop. They'll just VPN from their laptop and use Citrix to access those few applications.

The following represent how Citrix technology is leveraged in our organization: application virtualization capabilities, on-premise desktop virtualization, and Remote PC access or remote access to physical desktops. We don't do the latter a lot, but we do publish remote desktop as a published application. Some use remote desktop to get back to their machines. We don't use the remote PC functionality. I wish we did, personally, but those are decisions that unfortunately get made elsewhere, and RDP was chosen versus publishing them as an ICA app to people.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provides the flexibility of being used on any device, which makes it easier to work for many anywhere. The transition from people working in an office every day to working from home was seamless, for the most part for us, because almost everybody has a personal computer, whether it's a PC or a Mac. We had a lot of people go out and buy Chromebooks and any other type of device that they saw fit for themselves. They just logged in to our portal and launched their desktops, like they always would. It's very flexible.

The biggest benefit was when we had that transition when offices were closed due to the pandemic. We had thin clients in the offices, so people were already using Citrix whether they were in the office or not. The flexibility provided by that alone was invaluable, in just getting people able to work from home. That's what the product is supposed to do. We didn't really have work-from-as a model. People could do it, but it wasn't a big thing for us. It was more along the lines of when you were done for the day you went home, and if you had to log back in, you could. But for the most part, people were done with work until the next day.

Citrix also plays a part in our business continuity strategies. We have in-house applications and, since we have data centers in various regions, we need the ability for a given application to be live in other data centers, even though we only currently have it running from one. vSphere is the platform that we use for virtualization so we have infrastructure that's the same in every data center. We have a Citrix environment just for DR that we can copy our vDisks into, in Provisioning Services, from one data center to the next. We can then just spin up a Citrix desktop that has access to that DR environment. The other teams then spin up their pieces of infrastructure within that DR bubble and test it. Citrix gives people the ability to quickly get into that DR environment once it has been stood up.

Another aspect is that the solution has resulted in IT efficiencies because we can be pretty agile with quickly reverting changes and quickly implementing new changes. It provides a lot of flexibility for us.

The Provisioning Services are the most valuable feature. We have Premium licensing, so Provisioning Services is huge for us, along with the Virtual Apps and Desktops part. It allows us to have a vDisk for every region, one that can easily be copied between them if we need to, to limit the amount of updates we have to do. 

The ability to deploy shared, hosted desktops and published applications, is also important.

And I would rate the user experience, when using the solution’s technology remotely, as high as it can be. We have offices all over the world, and some of them are in areas that have absolutely terrible internet service. For users in those areas, while we do get complaints that the experience is bad, on most days it's tolerable, and that's even on the bad days when there is extremely high latency. Especially not knowing where people are going to be working from, I would say the user experience is very good.

When it comes to the solution’s centralized policy control, as in the policies you apply to ICA sessions and session hosts or virtual desktop agents, you can control those through group policy, in addition to group policy, or put them in from the console. But either way, as a central management point for the Citrix sessions, in general, it's very good. It gives us flexibility. For example, with the users who are in the bad internet service areas, those policies give us the flexibility to lower their user experience, to dim down the graphics and sound quality. We can do that on-the-fly when they report problems. That generally helps their experience a little bit. So the policy control is good.

And if you have the full line of Citrix products deployed—NetScaler, MAS, all of those items tied together—the visibility is second to none from a monitoring perspective. We use the NetScaler and the MAS and the data that comes through there is almost invaluable, if you have the licensing to use it.

In addition, the security of your intellectual property and data when remote employees are using Citrix, is very high because, with Citrix you can limit access to the local device and access to the network, so you can't copy files if you have certain policies set between the Citrix session and the endpoint. You can prevent printing. You can prevent any data from ever leaving that desktop. And if you're licensed for it, which we are not, they've recently added the ability to watermark screenshots and to have keylog protection in Citrix sessions. If you're licensed for it, that's just an added bonus to the security features that are built-in by default.

The version of Director we're on, the 1912 version, has improved some of the monitoring capabilities that went back to what EdgeSite used to be as a product, when it comes to real-time analytics. If anything could be improved, it might be some of the Director functionality, and some of the dashboard customization, or the overall Director customization. We're limited in what we do. We use Director, as administrators, more than the service desk does, and we limit their access to Director to a few screens. They don't even get to see the full scope of what we see in there. Director is one thing that could be improved upon.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for about 10 years. My first experience with any type of virtualization technology was with Citrix. My first helpdesk job was supporting a company that deployed Citrix applications specifically, not desktops. I started out doing it from a support perspective and then got into the administration and engineering side, at that same place. I've never worked on any other products like Citrix.

I would rate the stability very highly, as high as it can be, due to my long-term experience with the product and how it's evolved to the point that it's at. That rating is based on my firsthand knowledge and experience of seeing it used and implemented, day in and day out, not only here, but at other places I've been that are larger than where I am now. I have a high opinion of it in general. It's been my career choice to work specifically with Citrix products.

It scales very well. The limitations we face are our own hardware constraints, because we purchase what we need and we don't generally provide much overhead. Our scalability problems come from limitations on hardware purchases, probably due to budget. If our company doubled in size, we would not have a problem scaling what we have today to meet that. We could probably do it in a couple of days and be just as fine.

We're licensed for 3,000 users. Our primary usage is in the U.S. and the AMEA region. We have about 2,400 users in that region who are active on it at any given time. The rest of those licenses are used in the Asia Pacific region. They're not as active in Citrix because a lot of their stuff is not as centralized as our other infrastructure is. They still don't use a lot of the same stuff. But they do use Citrix for email and for a couple of other things.

We haven't used them recently, but I generally have a high opinion of Citrix technical support. They have the knowledge and give us access to the expertise. I've worked with them in the past on a lot of things and, in some instances, if not for working with them, some of the problems we faced wouldn't have been solved. We didn't have access to anyone else with that level of knowledge.

I just started here about a year ago, but I was involved in setting up the 1912 environment. The process was straightforward. While they've changed the product names over the years, the underlying architecture and the technology, for the most part, has remained the same. I know there have been technological advancements and changes in the underlying architecture, but the overall end result, and some of how it does things, has remained the same. The setup was very easy for me and I think it would be easy even for somebody who is slightly new to the product.

Our most recent deployment did not take long at all. The longest part of it was the formal requests to the other teams and having them provision the virtual machines that we requested for the infrastructure. The longest thing about the deployment for us is getting to the point where we're comfortable putting a desktop out there for user consumption. It's getting them to test and validate that we built that desktop the same as the current one they're using. It's not so much that the deployment takes long because of any Citrix product problems. It's more due to user acceptance testing of the functionality of the desktop itself and the software we use.

Four or five people are involved in deployment, between the ones on our team who build, install, and configure the various infrastructure pieces, and the people that we make requests to who build the database servers and the other virtual machines.

We deploy according to the best practices. We don't follow any specific guides, but we deploy with the minimum specs, plus what we know we need to scale for the user base that we have.

We did it ourselves.

Citrix provides everything in one integrated platform—even the lowest licensing version. It depends on your needs. But if you have the Premium Edition, it provides absolutely every tool you could need to virtualize and deploy.

I'm not involved with the licensing, purchasing, or cost-comparison types of discussions. I'm primarily on the technical side. But I would imagine the integrated platform plays a large part in providing value. Citrix is a leader in this space. Our company has to see some value in the product to pay for it as it is. I would always advocate for it over other similar products.

If you're looking at implementing it, plan as best you can at all levels. Citrix has its consulting methodology for how to properly plan and deploy an environment. I've been in a lot of places where I haven't seen the planning phase happening. Planning goes a long way towards a successful deployment, because you test a lot of things during the testing phase of that, in particular. You see things that you wouldn't otherwise see if you just built it and threw it out there and said, "Hey, use this." You would run into a lot of problems that you wouldn't understand, things that need to be tweaked for any deployment, no matter where you're deploying it. There is a set of standard things that you need to do. Planning goes a long way towards making sure that it's not only accepted by your end users but that it's supportable.

Access control comes into play because we have different Citrix environments for different regions and they don't really cross-talk. We do limit certain things to certain environments, or some things are only available from one environment. People from the other environments have to access it from a different environment, but to them it's seamless because they're all behind the same store-front environments.