Intro
Considering recent published articles surrounding Citrix Cloud I think it is important to remind institutions out there of the benefits. I will highlight (very briefly) 13 advantages about the Citrix Cloud (There are many more) and provide a link to a great article by fellow CTP Nicolas Ignoto on feature requests that should be incorporated in to the solution.
SQL Backend
This is a big one. If you have multiple resource locations on premises traditionally you are wanting multiple SQL servers for your Xenapp Sites back end. Moving to Citrix Cloud eliminates this. You also now can use WEM as a fully integrated cloud service meaning you do not have to worry about costly SQL. Have you checked how much SQL costs in Azure?
High Availability
All infrastructure is HA (Highly Available). Your Desktop Delivery Controllers (Brokers), license Servers, Studio, Director, SQL. Think of the comparable cost with IAAS or on premises.
Automatic Patching
All infrastructure is automatically upgraded. Citrix takes care of this for you eliminating the need to plan patch management. Hotfixes and Security patches are not your worry when it comes to the infrastructure components.
Always Latest Software
The infrastructure components are automatically upgraded to latest Citrix versions. You are on latest technology that is thoroughly tested before deployment. You get latest features and improvements.
License Usage
With the Citrix Xenapp and Xendesktop Service you can easily control your license usage. The licences are user licenses as there is no concurrent unless you subscribe to the full Workspace services, however you do get 2 for 1 trade up deals and hybrid rights usage. This allows you to continue using your on premises solution whilst migrating (testing) the Citrix Cloud. At time of writing I believe you have a 3 year transition period. The other advantage is you are eligible to release licenses after 30 days compared to 90 days for on premises environments.
Unified Management
You can easily manage multiple resource locations from one single unified management plane. This reduces the need for costly infrastructure at multiple site locations.
Smart Scale
You have the ability of controlling costs by using Smart Scale. This helps reduce the cost of your workloads in Azure, AWS or Xenserver (on premises). Think of the way public clouds incur cost by billing per minute. You can now have workloads running only during core operational hours or reduce workloads as users reduce.
Hidden Costs
Hard one to prove but if you think that there is an additional cost with Cloud you should think of the hidden cost savings also. Reduced tin, reduced operational costs, freeing up time and resource to concentrate on other initiatives, not worrying about upgrade cycles, multiple infrastructure in resource locations, easy central management, easy image management, monitoring capability included.
WEM
This will be a fully integrated Cloud service allowing you to improve the workspace experience for your users. Improve logon times by moving GPP to this service. Apply CPU and memory optimisations. The SQL back-end is managed by Citrix.
Smart Check
This is an automatic health check for your site. No need to deploy agents if you have the Xenapp and Xendesktop Cloud Service. You will receive diagnostics on your sites health such as machines in maintenance mode, services that are stopped and any back-end communication issues.
Simple Image Management
You have the ability to use MCS and PVS (on premises) via the Citrix Cloud. (Granted you do have this ability on premises -So maybe this one does not count.)
Cloud Agnostic
You can choose your Cloud of choice. There is no Cloud lock in. Citrix Cloud is public Cloud agnostic. Managing multiple resource locations in different public Clouds is easy.
Easy On boarding and ability to make POC
The time it takes to request a trial is up for debate but when you compare this to the time it takes to get traditional POC concepts running it is not that bad. This will be improved but it is easy to transition a on premises deployment to a running Citrix Cloud Xenapp and Xendesktop Service. We are talking hours and not days here!
Workspace App
Finally, you are able to take advantage of the Workspace experience using the Workspace APP which is an all in one place to go to use multiple resources you need on a daily basis. Whether it is Sharefile apps, Saas Apps, Web Apps, Xenapp/ Xendesktop Apps, on- premises, Cloud etc, you can browse and search for your resource through one easy to use Workspace App experience when linked to the Workspace in the Xenapp and Xendesktop Service.
Conclusion
Citrix Cloud is evolving and is improving and does have its limitations. I feel it is important to highlight some advantages though in the wake of some recent Citrix Cloud bashing. My fellow CTP’s provide a constructive article on the limitations that are being worked upon that is worth a read. The aim for this article is to provide some Yin and Yang to the pro’s and cons of the solution.
http://www.citrixguru.com/2018/07/13/top-wishlist-citrix-cloud/