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

The Citrix Workspace is a little easier compared to Citrix Receiver. We used to use Citrix Receiver and then switched to Citrix Workspace. Previously, we had to install five browser components and a couple more things to launch these applications.

Six to seven months after we started using this solution, we had an issue when we were using the Citrix server. We needed to install the Citrix Runtime in the server where the application was hosted. When we installed the Runtime, we needed to restart the production server. So, whenever our EMR application was going live, we had to plan to upgrade all our other surrounding tools and applications, so we could complete one restart and achieve everything at once.

The engineering team installed certain things to fix the issue, and now it is resolved. There are so many links within the Citrix application, so when we tried to launch it, we initially used IE. Initially, we never had an issue, but when we made Chrome an enterprise browser, then we were facing some slowness. But later, we realized that it was not a Citrix issue, it was some additional components of the browser that we needed to install so that it would be rightly redirected to the EFC.

We have been using this solution for ten years from a configuration perspective and almost three years from an automation perspective. We are using the latest version.

We are planning our next upgrade around mid-September. The solution is deployed on-premises.

It is a stable solution.

We have more than 500 people using this solution.

We have not used the technical support from Citrix. However, we reach out to our technical team for any issues.

I rate the pricing a five out of five because it is a good price.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. We have been using this solution for a long time and are comfortable using Citrix.

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.

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.

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 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.

We initially implemented it so that our attorneys had an option to work from home. The majority of them did not want to carry a laptop back and forth. Prior to 2020, we did have four of our 40 attorneys using it almost full-time on a work-from-home basis.

We use the following in protecting our environment: Citrix Gateway, Remote Desktop Access, Citrix Secure Browser, Web/URL Filtering, and Contextual Access.

It's amazing that if someone has a sick child, they can still work. It's not that they are completely dead in the water. They can log in and access 99 percent of what they need to, as if they were in the office, and the workflow is the same.

Our previous solution was Terminal Services and that had very low security. My only security concern with this solution is users saving their logins and passwords in the browser. The security it provides is relatively high. The built-in security of Citrix is leaps and bounds above what the basic Microsoft solution had. I did request we add two-factor authentication, but that has not yet been approved. My management feels that I am doing a disservice by trying to add security measures.

But something that makes our security easier is that Citrix provides access control based on device, location, end-user device, or application. One of the reasons we chose Citrix was because it was one of the more secure offerings for remote access. I have faith that Citrix will continue to have that.

In addition, when COVID hit and I maxed out my Citrix licensing, I used the automated analytics to try to ensure everything was running well. It was very nice to be able to log in and see that I wasn't exceeding any capacity of Citrix or the servers themselves.

It provides everything in one integrated platform, and most of it is on one dashboard, which makes it even better. Monetarily, Citrix is a mid-range cost solution compared to some others out there. It does help our attorneys because, with attorneys, time is money. It helps alleviate downtime. I don't think that Citrix actually saves me any money, but it prevents me from losing any.

The most valuable feature has to be the non-persistent desktop. If one of my users messes something up and blows away their desktop, it goes back to what it was originally, before they had an issue.

Our employees also absolutely love the flexibility of using it on any device. We have quite a few people who use iPads and they really like the experience on that, regardless of where they are. The only difference is that the speed of the connection changes, but nothing else does. The consistency is huge.

The solution's centralized policy control and distributed enforcement work well. We have the desktops locked down so users can not add their own software. That's centrally controlled and it does make it easier to be able to present a consistent experience.

I also like that we have redundancy built in. The last time we upgraded, which was three years ago, we put in dual controllers and dual storefront machines. We have never had an outage that the users were aware of. I did have a desktop server crash and was able to restore that from backup. Nobody ever knew. They had had the same experience regardless.

The only thing we have found to be detrimental is when we have tried to find training. I realize that we're looking at it at the worst time possible, with a pandemic going on, but it seems that most of the training offered is learn-by-yourself online. I have a desktop admin who would love to be able to dig deeper into group policy and settings, to be able to admin Citrix a little bit more easily. That's the only thing that I would like to see an improvement on, the availability of training for novice users.

I've been using Citrix for at least 14 years, maybe 15.

It's very stable. It's one of the most stable software applications I run. You set it up and it just goes.

In terms of scalability, it seems that the only things that limit you are your number of licenses and your compute. So scaling is very easy.

Prior to the work-from-home initiative, I had about a dozen users who consistently used it. After COVID and the work-from-home, even though I had only 20 licenses, I had 24 people who were using it. Those four extra people were working part-time in the office and part-time from home so they shared the license. When one was in the office, the other would use it, so I never exceeded my license capacity. And now, since the State of Idaho lifted work-from-home, I'm back down to about eight people who are on it consistently.

The support is excellent. They are wonderful. Luckily I have only had to use them once for a critical issue. I got on the phone, was transferred to an engineer, and had it resolved in less than 20 minutes. For minor issues that are questions, they usually have those resolved in less than 24 hours. And usually, the delay is on my end getting their fix implemented and responding.

We had tried Microsoft Terminal Services and found it sadly lacking for the user experience. We went ahead and implemented Citrix and we have been using it ever since. Terminal Services was Microsoft's attempt to do a remote desktop presentation and it failed miserably. There were a lot of issues and items with Terminal Services. The biggest advantage with Citrix was the consistent experience. Terminal Services was not consistent. If you got too many users on it, desktop icons would move and applications wouldn't load.

While the centralized policy control and distributed enforcement work well, I wish we understood it better. I had a local engineer with Citrix certification build my farm for me. Since it was a brand new concept for me, it was very difficult to grasp at first. He did some preliminary training for us: How to admin it, how to update, how to make things run. But I am in no way an expert on the back-end. If I was able to take the time, which is kind of hard, to learn how all of the nuts and bolts work, I could improve the user experience a little bit. It's a lack of knowledge from my side.

From start to finish, our deployment took about two weeks, and that was mostly because the engineer could not dedicate his full time to me. It was a couple of hours here and there. Overall, the time billed was about 20 hours.

We built the servers, we tested the servers, and then we pushed them out to the handful of attorneys who had requested the ability to work from home. Then we fine-tuned it from there. I really let my users be my test-bed.

Any maintenance is done by me, but it requires minimal maintenance, mostly upgrades.

My advice is get an engineer. Their knowledge can't be matched. A very good one will do it as an educational experience, so you learn as you go. Having somebody who knows Citrix inside and out build it, with best practices and what would suit our needs the best, was invaluable to me. And our engineer has provided support on the minor things afterwards and that has been wonderful. I love the support.

My users either love it or hate it. There is no in-between. The ones who love it do so because it is very consistent in how it works. You log in, everything works. It's the same desktop, the same software, every single time. The people who hate it are the ones who use their desktop to store things, and I don't save the world on their desktops. As soon as they hit that 2 GB mark, I start deleting things. Those are the people who don't know how file stores work.

Even though we run the servers on-prem, we advertise it as a "cloud solution" since it's accessed through a web portal, and that has helped quite a bit in pushing my user base to understand what "cloud" really means. I can see moving this off-prem to a cloud solution in the future, but at this time my budget is frozen, so it's not going to be anytime soon.

I usually don't have to refer to the solution's behavior analytics for detecting anomalies because if something isn't working optimally, my users let me know immediately. They're very vocal if something isn't the way they expect it to be.

Our primary use case became present during the COVID-19 pandemic where we were forced to send all employees home and deploy Citrix Cloud Virtual Apps and Desktops to enable users to work remotely.

It's deployed as a hybrid cloud, the Citrix cloud with on-premise workloads. We deployed the hosted shared desktop, so we have terminal servers running on-premise in our data center, and users connect via Virtual Apps and Desktops to their desktops. This allows users to use their own laptops.

We also use Citrix Gateway, Access Gateway, and SD-WAN to protect our environment.

It has given us the ability for people to access the apps that are on-premise, meaning users can work from home or from anywhere. It's allowed the business to carry on like it did before COVID. As a result, COVID hasn't had an impact on the productivity of our users while they're working remotely. Users have been able to carry on working the way they did when they were in the office. If this was not in place, our staff would not have been able to work and we would have lost productivity.

Our company supports Zero Trust as a security strategy and Citrix is excellent as an end-to-end solution for implementing Zero Trust principles. We are able to use security analytics to determine whether a device or a user has been compromised and we can actually then log the user off or block the user from accessing our Citrix environment. That gives us great peace-of-mind.

In addition, the security of our intellectual property and data when remote employees are using the solution is strengthened significantly because data does not leave the business thanks to Virtual Apps and Desktops. Our previous solution was a full VPN, and that gave users the ability to leak data. With Virtual Apps and Desktops, it's a lot more difficult to do that.

It has also given us the ability to implement business continuity plans, with the example I mentioned above being one that we have already implemented.

Another way this solution improves the way we function is that it provides intelligent analytics for proactive detection of malicious user behaviors. We're using the security analytics from Citrix and it improves our security operations because we've made central rules. If somebody breaches the rules, the analytics will kick in and stop that user from working. It has enabled us to detect breaches both before and during their occurrence. It has saved us a lot of time because it automatically blocks malicious users.

Furthermore, it provides access control based on device, location, end-user device, or application. That improves our security posture because if you don't want somebody from a malicious location to access things, it will block them.

The most valuable feature is the ability to connect to our on-premise applications, through the Workspace app and the Workspace experience.

The user experience when using the solution's technology remotely is outstanding. Our users are able to work and it's seamless with fantastic performance.

The solution provides the flexibility of being used on any device. It improves the user experience because users are able to use whichever device they prefer.

The solution’s centralized policy control and distributed enforcement is a major benefit because it allows us to manage everything in one place. We can enable users to remotely connect and access local devices, and we can change that in one place. It will then either lock it down or give the user the abilities granted. It's all done in one place.

In addition, the solution's user behavior analytics for detecting anomalies and enforcing security policies works. When you put rules in place, they are enforced and the solution will immediately prevent unwanted activity from happening. Our security is improved as a result because our staff who manage security don't have to worry. Citrix is doing the work for them.

At the moment, we are not using Citrix Endpoint Management. It has provided obstacles preventing it from working on our system.

The visibility the solution provides across SaaS, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, for user and application traffic, is also limited if you do not enable all the services and is based on which services you are utilising. Citrix provides end-to-end visibility based on their services you are utilising.

In addition, improved "how-to" guides would be hugely beneficial in setting the products up.

We have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for the last seven months.

It's very stable at the moment. We haven't had any issues.

The solution is incredibly easy to scale.

We have about 200 users of the solution in our company. Everybody, every single role in the business, uses it. It has been adopted 100 percent in our company, but we use the solution to showcase what's possible to other companies.

Technical support is not too bad. It's okay. It's not 100 percent great. I would give it 85 or 90 percent. There's room for improvement.

With the cloud services there isn't enough understanding of the different services within the solution. We've got more than one product from them and for some of the products there is good support and for some of the products there is not good support. I've had a call open for quite a while and it's still not resolved.

Before Citrix we used VPN. We enabled Citrix for the business because it was a simpler solution and provided a great user experience. To roll out the VPN solution for everybody would have taken too long during a state of urgency. Also, there was a concern that capacity on the firewall might not handle all the user connections. With Citrix, there will be limited impact on the network and cost savings on data usage compared to normal VPN.

The initial setup was easy. The team built the whole environment in two weeks, and it would usually take six months if you had to do so on-premise. With the cloud, it's a lot faster.

The implementation strategy was to make sure we enabled users to work from home and that we provided them the tools they needed to be able to do their daily work. The strategy was to go with the cloud because it was quick and easy to deploy. With on-premise, while it wouldn't have been more expensive, the time to do it would have been much longer.

We use two people to deploy the solution, senior engineers or one of our leading architects.

We did it ourselves as we're a Platinum Citrix partner.

There would have been increase in data cost for the business as the usage for VPN would have required bigger data bundles to be provided for the end users and with Citrix the data usage went down as the technology does not required a lot of data. The users were also able to process more activities with Citrix Workspace in comparison to utilising VPN connections. The business had capacity on our current infrastructure which limited the cost to deploy the solution, the only cost was the software that was required like Citrix.

The licensing, in general, is expensive. A lot of customers battle to pay the amount. It's very difficult to ensure that your solution provides the business value that the customer is after.

In addition to the standard licensing fees you need to pay Microsoft licensing as well.

Make sure you do a proper assessment and plan the rollout properly. That will ensure that the product is a success. Understand what the use cases are and if the Citrix solution is the right use case for the problem that you have. Explain what the business value is, because sometimes it's difficult to explain that.

User training is something that is important so that people understand how to use the product. This is important because the new way of working through one workspace is something that users still need to understand and get use to.

It provides an integrated platform but I wouldn't say it does everything you need to do. It's a step in the right direction. The value that the security analytics bring is to ensure that there are no malicious attacks. You enable the product and you don't have to worry about it. You need to do some maintenance on it at times, but it improves security for you.

My focus has primarily been on publishing virtual applications.

Pricing and technical support need improvement. 

I have been using Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) for fifteen years. 

The scalability of Citrix matches with almost all devices. 

The technical support was challenging in the beginning but now it seems to improve. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.