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

As a care provider we provide hospital and community health services with around 3,200 staff at the hospital and a further 650 community staff who work in local clinics and in patients' homes. On 1^st April 2020, we acquired our first primary care practice as part of our move towards being an integrated care system.

In terms of Citrix our biggest use case is for remote access and remote control. The former provides a VPN connection and the latter a published desktop. Prior to the onset of the COVID virus we had a 200 concurrent connection license covering both types of connection but today, following an NetScaler upgrade we now have a license for 1,000 concurrent users. Typically we're running 500 to 600 connections out to those locations every day.

Our hospital systems are a mix of SaaS and on-premises solutions. Our primary clinical platform is the Cerner Millennium electronic patient record (EPR) system, and that is delivered entirely over Citrix. However, we also use Citrix on-premises to deliver a range of services, including modern workspace, sharefile, load balancing (over 4 NetScaler’s) and of course remote control and remote access. Recently we have been working with Citrix to develop a thin-client workstation-on-wheels, for use on our hospital wards and believe this to be the first of its type. That's really where the relationship with Citrix has stepped up, because we're doing some new, innovative work.

We've consolidated all of our previous licenses into the latest version of the Citrix Workspace Premium Plus package to optimise the value received from the investment and are shortly to tender for a new support package that we expect will see us engage directly with Citrix.

The Citrix technologies allows us to do some clever things. For example, it has enabled our Radiologists review images that are quite large at home. Imagine trying to squeeze a 20Gb mammogram down a broadband connection, it is simply not practical. Yet by combining the Citrix technology with a specialist workstation from our Imaging partner, we're now able to have radiologists working successfully from home, reviewing MRIs, CTs, plain films, etc., because all we're sending are keystrokes and screen updates.

In terms of Security. Our organization has achieved the Cyber Essentials Plus security accreditation. My organization takes security very seriously. In fact, as far as I know, we're the only hospital in our region that has three full-time staff who work on security within the IT department. We very much take that Zero Trust position and ensure that we provide the necessary policies and controls to protect our organization, but not to the point where we impact our agility or flexibility in terms of supporting people who genuinely have a need.

We've built a strategic relationship with Citrix and we use a lot of their products for everything that we do. I would rate the Citrix stack highly as an end-to-end solution for implementing Zero Trust principles. It's allowed us to do a lot of things quickly and flexibly, and some of the functionality that has become available as we've moved into the newer, more advanced versions of the Citrix software, have proved very beneficial.

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

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

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

Citrix tends to have the most capabilities surrounding desktops.

The application virtualization is very, very good.

We offer our Citrix platform to all faculty, staff, and students at the university. We are a university on eight campuses throughout the state with about 130,000 potential users. We have the capability to offer any applications that we're licensed for and that fit well, being virtualized on that platform, to everybody. We offer it to everybody, but not everyone shows up.

We have special use cases where we're using the same physical infrastructure, but have carved up specialty virtual apps, desktops, and networks, for certain pockets of the university. We offer them to the School of Medicine, our Dentistry School, and to the university Online Program, where we have certain faculty that teach their courses exclusively online. We have to customize desktops for those particular fields of study, or for faculties that want to teach in via online learning. 

In addition, for the School of Medicine and Dentistry, we do all of our clinical offerings. Anytime that we can virtualize a clinical offering and extend that beyond the brick and mortar part of the university, we do that. So that also applies to our Speech and Hearing Sciences. We train all of our future audiologists on the virtual platform. And it goes for Optometry.

We also offer assistance to our on-campus health center.

Another use case is that we offer the employees like me, people we call our "staff employees" of whom there are about 5,000, the ability to support their other IT infrastructure environments remotely. We have a special network that we've isolated for security purposes and streamlined for certain types of special research projects.

We also have a global network operations team because the university runs something called the Internet2. That's important. We give the folks who support Internet2 the tools, virtualized through our Citrix environment, so that they can work from home and support that in a secured manner.

We have Citrix Gateway but we don't have Single Sign-on. We have a lot of the Remote PCs, which has naturally been beneficial in dealing with the surge in usage due to COVID. We don't have Citrix Secure Browser deployed in production, but it is in test. We have Web/URL Filtering on the NetScaler. We also use the Web App Gateway and Citrix ADC. We deploy a two-factor authentication environment, on the security side. So we definitely force a second-level authentication. We have that integrated with a product called Duo.

It's deployed as a hybrid model. At the university, we have contracts with all of the big three cloud providers. It's our intention to be able to extend workload to all of them: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

The user experience when using the solution's technology remotely is definitely superior to our VPN and/or Windows Remote Desktop. It's a much better user experience for those folks.

The solution provides the flexibility of being used on any device. That allows the employees to be truly mobile in their remote work environments. They don't have to worry about running back to their physical homes to get on a laptop. They can use their phones if they need to. They can just be connected at all times.

The solution provides intelligent analytics for proactive detection of malicious user behavior. To some extent, we do have that on the Netscaler. We have analytics constantly collecting information and setting the alerts for deviations that we would see in our network traffic patterns. It has helped us to detect breaches before damage was done. 

Once it's fully deployed, I believe the solution's automated analytics will help us to detect serious performance issues. We are not there yet.

The Citrix solution also provides everything in one integrated platform. We haven't found the need, yet, to go out and buy another product to help us in that space. There is still depth that we need to explore with the existing product line. In terms of the value this brings, while user experience is something that is quantitatively hard to express, certainly our university is touted for being very forward-thinking and for its advancements, compared to other universities. That's especially true in our particular state as it relates to the flexibility in offering our solutions remotely. I don't know anybody else that does that.

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 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.

The main focus of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop is remote access, mobility, and speed of deployment. 

Our most important use case is remote access. We had to deal with a lot of complaints from our users that were really difficult to troubleshoot. 90 percent of the issues were related to the local connection with the Internet and traffic problems with the ISP, which were not related to Citrix nor our infrastructure. This was difficult to troubleshoot. Since we have had Citrix Director implemented, every session looks crystal clear on the platform. We know exactly what each one of our 7,000 users is doing with the platform and how their sessions are performing. It has helped us to give better support and recommendations to our employees regarding the use of the product and their requirements for their welcome networks and Internet access. It has been a huge improvement for our Internet service.

Our organization has the following protecting its environment:

• Citrix Gateway/Single Sign-on (SSO)
• Remote PC Access and Remote Desktop Access
• Web/URL Filtering
• Contextual Access
• Citrix Endpoint Management
• Citrix ADC
• Citrix SD-WAN.

We are mostly an on-premise customer. Most of the visibility that we need, it is inside our network.

Citrix is a key solution for our business continuity plan/strategy. We are using it for remote access for every single employee, business partner, and service provider. Citrix is used for anyone working with Banco Galicia. One of the most interesting examples is what happened with this pandemic. At this moment, 95 percent of our employees are using Citrix as the only tool to do their job. That's it. It is as simple as it sounds. 

There is no difference between being at the office or home when using the solution’s technology remotely. You can't even feel the difference.

The solution provides the flexibility of being used on any device. We designed this solution with Citrix and our local partner, and one of the main aspects of the project was the ability to use it everywhere and with any device that you want. That was one of the requirements. We encourage the use of corporate-owned devices, but if you prefer your personal devices more than the corporate provided ones, then we make sure that you can use it safely without putting our business and infrastructure at risk. This is a really good solution from a bring-your-own-device perspective.

Our organization supports Zero Trust as a security strategy. In the last three to four years, Citrix has made huge improvements so we can have all its features on the same solution. Even with the simplest Citrix deployment, you have all its features available without additional products so you can provide safe access to your apps and infrastructure.

We have some protections for location-based access on our network delimiter. Our business is 99 percent locally in Argentina, so we have different policies on our network access. Then, we are evolving our deployment of interpretation and analysis from Citrix based on the software that you have installed, device that you using, and different policies.

We are Citrix administrators, responsible for configuring everything for the users in our company. We manage Citrix Workforce, addressing any issues or errors that arise along with all configurations and fixes.

In terms of Citrix Workforce features, the most valuable for managing our remote workforce is security, especially AppProtect. Users cannot simply copy and paste data to their local devices. This prevents data breaches, as data can't be copied to OneDrive or Google Drive. Screenshots from local PCs are also blocked, though data can still be manually copied using a phone.

The control over device accessibility is very useful and secure. Citrix Workforce includes MFA and McAfee, which makes it easier to identify who is accessing the VDI. Without MFA, we wouldn't know if the person accessing is authorized, especially from remote locations like Chicago.

Managing Citrix Workforce is also easier due to its user-friendly interface, which is straightforward and intuitive. This has significantly enhanced productivity in our industry.

I am publishing desktops as well as applications.

Citrix offers a range of products that can be used straight out of the box.

When it comes to Citrix, the main advantage is its protocol, which has gone through several name changes including ICA and HDX. It originally started out as Thinwire in 1988, and now they are back to using that name again. 

This protocol allows for faster transmission and beats competitors such as RDP. Citrix has tried various approaches with VMware, but nothing can beat the speed of their protocol, which works very effectively.