Endpoint management is used for multiple things. One would be for my VPN gateway. Second, it is used for security. Using it, I do not have to put our data and our applications on laptops or other third-party devices. Data and applications are always in the data center. Endpoint Security is always the guardian and mostly always used to access patient applications — which we need extra security on. Endpoint Security helps us to accomplish those goals.
One of the most valuable features of Endpoint Security would be that all the data is localized in a data center. It is not on the user's device. I can do so many things with it to maintain the security that it is an enhancement to our environment. For example, I can allow BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and ensure that there will not be any data loss.
At my level, I do not know what needs to be improved for the normal end-user because I do not really log into the devices anymore. But based on our experience — on my people's experience — I do not think there is much more left to be improved for our needs. It really comes down to how good your people are in terms of execution. If they are well-trained and if they know what their stuff, then things are going to be easily.
We have been using Citrix Endpoint Management since January. So I have been working with it for roughly eight months.
There are challenges every now and then with the stability, but it is never anything that we cannot fix.
There are a lot of methods for scaling the product in use and functionality. One would be increasing licenses so that you can have more users. In terms of power, there are different scaling methods like vertical or horizontal scaling. Those are things that are easy for us to turn on at any time. We can just contact our supplier to provide us with what we need by asking for it.
Our current users include a group of administrators which is, more-or-less, ten people. These are the ones that actually maintains the system. Then we are talking about 7,000 users who mostly use the product on a daily basis. This would mostly be the doctors and the nurses.
I once called the president of Citrix here in the Philippines and I have direct contact with her at this point if I need it. I also have an account manager with Citrix on the supplier side. He is actually very helpful in escalating certain issues to their engineering team if there is a critical issue.
There is not really anything that needs to be improved in the area of available documentation. I think it is perfectly done: abundant and available.
I have used VMware as well. Which product you would use depends on your implementation and needs. For my sake and from the perspective of my business, my use case is very much aligned with what Citrix does well.
The initial setup was a bit complex. In our case, I have the right resources on our installation team which did the install. Because they are a talented group, it was a simple process for us.
We planned the deployment properly. We worked with Citrix and the SI (Systems Integrator) who supported us. We actually created a very good plan to have a roadmap to execute the foundation and just do incremental addition of other capabilities. It has become very easy for us to implement nowadays. We do our day-to-day start and end date processes and proceed through the ongoing deployment.
It took us three months to do the foundation of it and now we just continue to integrate the other applications. We took an agile approach where we started with specific foundational implementations. Now we are just integrating one-by-one with the other applications that we already have in the hospital.
We are talking about hundreds of applications so it was not something that would have ever been reasonable to think would occur overnight.
As far as maintenance, it is really built into the daily processes. I do not think it is really necessary to take an intensive maintenance approach. Our team can take care of issues if any arise.
Endpoint Management comes in a bundle of many other products that we bought, I can not say what the exact cost was. Whether it was cheap or expensive is actually subjective anyway. In my opinion, it is actually in a very good sweet spot. It is just in the middle of what I want to spend. It is not too cheap so that it can not do what I need it to. It is not too expensive for me so that it breaks my budget.
When I was making my evaluation for the solution I needed, the situation was more of an emergency. I looked up reference documents to just tell me which should be in the top 10 or so of this product category. When I saw the Citrix solution was in the mix, it was good because I already had a current relationship with them. I called them up and nearly immediately — within four hours — they were able to fire up a machine for me. It was a snap decision based on availability and my previous relationship with the company, and that is basically what happened in making my decision.
First and foremost, anyone considering this product has to gather their complete use case and know for certain exactly what they really want to do. Based on that, they can align their use-case needs with the different products in the category. From that vantage they can see which of the viable solutions actually address their requirements. The next thing to do is look at the capability to scale in terms of a roadmap. This is not only looking at the number of licenses but the other enterprise-wide capabilities as well. For example, they may need to look at capabilities for doing load balancing or doing VPNs. If a product can do all the things that you need with a simple upgrade of a license or something that is not complicated or extremely costly, then you should also evaluate the product in that light as well.
On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best. I can rate Citrix endpoint management as a perfect ten. It absolutely covers our needs perfectly.
