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

Our primary use case of this solution is for secured access to design data.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it supports team clients. That is the major advantage where a user can at one point in time work in a secure environment, where they don't have access to the internet, but just by switching the window, they can go to an environment from the same device and can start using the internet, the two are mutually exclusive. You can't share data unless there is authorization given.

The solution can use more promotion to spread awareness. The cost of the solution needs to be reduced to compete with the other competitive solutions that are available. The setup is currently complex and can be easier.

I have been using the solution for over five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is complex. The deployment can take over one day.

The implementation is completed in-house by our team.

The licensing is $125 USD per user. The cost needs to come down substantially.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

Anyone interested in the solution should definitely evaluate it and carry out POC before deciding on the requirements. You should evaluate at least one case and then make a decision.

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.

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.

XenApp is a really good product. The user experience is awesome. The security features that it has are invaluable for a customer like us. Because we are highly regulated, we need to operate in a highly secure environment. 

We love Citrix SD-WAN and have it fully deployed on all of our network and branches.

We saw a huge improvement when we implemented Citrix Director. We have full visibility of our users' traffic, from their houses to our data center. This solution has provided a huge advantage with visibility.

The solution provides everything in one integrated platform. When it comes to monitoring their solution, it is really easy. We have all the information in one place so we can have the right information at the right moment. We can be proactive when it comes to dealing with performance, maintenance, and security issues. 

The product advances really fast. For some customers, we need better backwards compatibility. 

For products that we still have to use some legacy software, the virtualization of applications works okay, but sometimes it requires some additional effort from our team to make it work.

For more than 10 years.

The stability is good. It is one of the most important aspects that we took into account when we decided that Citrix would be our platform for mobile access and remote access. The platform is completely stable.

We have done a lot of integrations using different applications and vendors with Citrix. Everything is well-documented. All integrations have been tested, and we have proof that they work. You feel confident when you move forward. An example is that four months ago we had our Citrix solution sized for 2,000 employees. Since the pandemic exploded, we were able to scale up to 7,000 users in 48 hours. If that is not simplicity, I don't know how to define it.

From an administration point of view, everything looks simple, consistent, and seems to have been designed to provide the same type of user experience that we are providing to our users. However, you have the same kind of feeling when you have to perform all the administration of the suite. It's very simple to use it and perform all the maintenance and monitoring activities. We have only two administrators for 7,000 users. This means that it's not that simple because it does require skill, but the experience is good and everything looks simple on the platform.

We have always had support from the Citrix working team as well as the business partner working with us here in Argentina. The Citrix people and their partners have a good skill level. Every project that we start with them, we always can move at a good speed because everybody knows what they're doing.

Previously, we used a combination between regular VPN access plus Citrix. Then, we decided to remove the standard VPN product and move ahead with the Citrix's solution.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. 

It is well-documented on the Citrix support side. All the official documentation is accurate.

Our deployment never ends. We have been working with Citrix for more than 10 years, so we are always deploying new things.

We have seen ROI using Citrix from time savings, employee satisfaction, and security. 

The Citrix licensing scheme is really straightforward and simple. It doesn't have hidden costs. You get what you pay for. It is easy to understand what is on the product, so it's simple to get a clear idea of how much it costs. Licensing is not an issue. 

We evaluated Cisco, Fortinet, and Check Point. The main differences between these products and Citrix were the user experience, ease of deployment, and end-to-end solution. With other products, when you try to enforce your security policies, the experience turns difficult and messy for the end user. With Citrix, when you deploy your solution from day zero, you can focus right away on delivering a good experience for your end users, customers, or business partners. You can be also focused on security, which is one of the key topics that IT professionals must focus on.

We use products from other vendors to provide intelligent analytics for proactive detection of malicious user behaviors.

Once you give it to your internal customers or your employees, it won't be easy for you to take it away. Therefore, training is one of the most important things. It's really important to have all your team trained and certified on your products before starting a deployment. 

Security is the key to everything right now. With Citrix, you don't have to focus only on delivering virtual apps on your desktops or remote access because there is no trade-off between user experience and security or speed of deployment and security. 

We have been doing a deep dive with things related to endpoint analysis and security policies, but we haven't taken a look at the analytics part.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

The main use case for me is the solution’s ability to provide remote users access to enterprise LAN over thin Internet-connected devices securely and efficiently.

I have found the NetScaler or ADC devices by Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops valuable. The product is simple to set up, and its deep integration with Microsoft is also a valuable feature.

Their customer support can be improved a lot as it lacks a lot of knowledgeable help.

I have been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for the past 14 years.

It is a stable solution. It is a fire-and-forget solution. Once you set it up, things keep happening, and you don't even have to monitor it until you want to get some statistics.

The solution is scalable. Approximately 10,000 users use the solution in my company. We often use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops in our company, but it all depends on the use cases. If we find the solution convenient for our projects, we will definitely use it. However, we'd only do it on a case-to-case basis. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is our go-to solution for any server-based computing.

The customer support for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops should be more knowledgeable.

The setup is pretty simple and easy. We keep deploying it very often based on our requirements, but the complete setup can be done in three days or less than three days for a 1000 people user base. It's more of a fire-and-forget solution. It will take three days if you have the entire idea. If you want to chart out from the beginning, that could take around two months. However, if you know what you're doing, it can be done in three days.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a decade-old technology. We don't need any consultants to set it up. Any candidate with five to six years of experience should be able to set it up. We analyze the applications, the customers, and the users. We also consider the type of user base and the type of applications, and then we plan our infrastructure to meet their requirements and do a POC before deploying the solution. Considering Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a 24/7 uptime solution, we need at least six technical staff for its deployment and maintenance.

We do have an ROI using this solution.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is an expensive solution.

I use the latest LTSR version of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

Someone who needs an enterprise solution with a stable working environment should go for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. If there is no 24/7 requirement, and they can manage a few hours of outage, people should look at alternatives for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. This solution is for critical users who cannot do without it. Banking and finance customers should adopt the cloud version of this solution and not the enterprise version.

Overall, I rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops an eight out of ten.

I'm an infrastructure architect.

We frequently use the Workspace Environment Manager service, which is a valuable feature. We're also happy with the interaction between our collaborative tools. 

I think the ITSM adapters need to be enhanced. Currently, even though it says the solution is a PaaS, there are a couple of activities happening between the cloud and on-prem environments that could use some additional detail. Even though we see our collaborative tools working well with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, on a practical level we face challenges due to various factors. Our users are in different regions; their endpoint device is in one location, but the collaborative controls are in a different data center. Given our VDA infrastructure, accessing collaborative tools is becoming a little challenging. It might be fine on paper, but when it comes to actually working with it, improvements could be made. From our end, we need to make sure our collaborator tools are working as expected.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

When you compare the cloud version to the on-premise Citrix environment, the cloud version wins out. You don't need to worry about scalability. Once you have a license, you just start adding the load you want. We have around 8,000 users. 

We contact technical support when we are in urgent need. They have a process where they ask some basic questions and that seems unnecessary as it wastes time when you're looking for a rapid response. We get an engineer on the line and he asks the basic questions and then a new person is brought in and starts all over again with the same basic questions. 

If you know your prerequisites, the initial setup is simple. Without the proper advanced knowledge, you may end up in a situation where you will not be able to achieve what you need or want. 

We evaluated Horizon View as a possible option. Whenever anyone thinks of a virtual desktop environment, they think of Citrix. Horizon View comes into the picture when you don't need any extra features, just a reliable and secure infrastructure. Citrix fitted our needs more closely. 

There is still some room for improvement so I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

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.

I have been using this solution for quite a long time. We have seen it evolve over the years. We primarily use this solution for virtual desktops and virtual applications.

We use the entire Citrix Suite. This XenDesktop solution helps with applications or desktops. It tunnels data into the system and the internal network. Employees can access the network anywhere. They can save files, print files, and access the network from home or the office in a secure environment.

We are looking for speed and agility in an environment. We want to see that the SAN storage can be policed and can detect a network latency. 

It is pretty stable. We have five of us on staff to maintain the stability of the environment of the solution. 

It is scalable. We have about a hundred desktops and we have about 1,100 people that access it externally.

The tech support is pretty good. My only complaint is that if you are calling in a ticket, you need to know who is answering the call. The overseas support is more delayed. If you ask for a US representative, they are quicker to respond to the ticket. 

The setup was easy due to our extensive use of Citrix products. If a rookie was installing it, I would suggest looking at the website and the Citrix whitepapers.  

Our deployment took about a year because we wanted to vet it correctly. The vetting process took about four and a half months to deal with the bugs. We slowly ramped the system up into a working phase. This was to ease our network into the system without a lot of issues. Our test users really helped iron out the issues before deployment.

The ROI for us has been that when we had Hurricane Harvey last year, XenDesktop came in very handy for us. Even though people had electricity in Texas, many networks were down. Our offices could still get into our network and do work that was needed. It is an excellent virtual office that works anywhere, anytime, and anyplace. It is worth our investment.

It is quite expensive, but so are the competitors on the market but, you get what you pay for.

We looked at VMware Horizon View which compliments nicely with VMware products. Since our team was all familiar with Citrix it made the most sense. It makes our job much easier to use a product our team understands and has prior experience using.

My advice is to really vet the system a bit before choosing a solution. Always make sure you have a budget for it.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the solution work well in your lab?
• Does it work well in your office?
• Do you have a good network infrastructure? 
• Will it support your needs?