What advice do you have for others considering Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops?

I rate the overall product a six out of ten.

We are using Citrix DaaS in the IT industry. The solution's security aspect has influenced our trust in using it for remote access. I would recommend Citrix DaaS to other users for its security and performance. Overall, I rate Citrix DaaS a nine out of ten.

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

Anyone looking to deploy Citrix DaaS needs to first understand their business use case and determine why they want to offer Citrix DaaS as either an application or desktop version to their end users. It's crucial to assess whether their end users truly need this solution. If so, they should understand the profile requirements and how applications will behave when virtualized or moved to the cloud. After this assessment, proceed with testing, then a pilot, and finally, roll out to production. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

To those who plan to use the solution, I suggest that they initially take care of the PoC area because it is only useful, and they would appreciate the product if they intend to use it. Citrix DaaS is a powerful solution. I recommend the product to only those who involved their IT staff during the PoC process, along with some end users, since if you don't involve the right people in the initial phases, there could be future problems with the product. I rate the product a nine out of ten. I rate the company named Citrix a six or seven out of ten. I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

I advise others to get training on how to use Citrix DaaS. It will help them understand the functionality before purchasing it. I rate it an eight out of ten.

I won't recommend Citrix DaaS to other users. I don't know if there are any other better solutions. However, Citrix DaaS is also a good solution if the speed issue is resolved. Overall, I rate Citrix DaaS a four or five out of ten.

People planning to use Citrix must take the right decision for their firm rather than evaluate the cost from the start. It is a robust solution. I rate it a nine out of ten.

When considering Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, it is important to consider the environment in which you wish to deploy virtual desktops. It is essential to plan ahead and thoroughly assess the application requirements, hardware resources needed, security protocols that need to be implemented, and other factors when making an informed decision. Additionally, it is recommended to properly evaluate the cost versus value of a Citrix solution to ensure that it is the right choice for your organization. Additionally, partner with an IT consultant or reseller who can provide guidance and support on deploying Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops in your environment. Lastly, make sure that you have access to the necessary resources for regular maintenance and updates of the system. By following these basic steps, you can ensure a successful virtual desktop deployment with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

This also applies to hosted solutions such as cloud-based solutions for remote access. Cloud hosting can provide additional scalability and cost-saving benefits when compared to more traditional onsite deployments. Before making your decision, be sure to research the various hosting solutions available and find the one that best fits your organization's needs. Additionally, be sure to consider any security requirements you will need to comply with when using a cloud-based solution.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

It is important to receive proper training rather than relying solely on online resources or Googling. I have been using it successfully in larger enterprise deployments since 1997. I would rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops a nine out of ten. I am currently working as a senior infrastructure engineer for a company, but in the past, I have also been a reseller and had my own consulting company where I sold and provided consulting services for Citrix products.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

My advice to others is to make sure that your physical environment has sufficient computing resources, otherwise the performance won't be as good as it could be and your users won't be happy with it. Besides ensuring stable infrastructure, you should implement the solution with people who have the required experience needed to manage it. I would rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops an eight out of ten.

We're a partner. We are using Citrix both for ourselves and our customers. Citrix is one of the pioneers in this area and has been around for a long time. The technical support is good. From a usability standpoint, it's also good; however, there are some aspects, like hosting, and especially on-prem deployments, where some manual work is needed. It could be that we are not doing as per the latest guidelines or something, which we need to look at and see what we can improve. That said, overall, it's a good product for remote connectivity and remote desktop applications. I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We are working with Citrix VDI, and we are mainly working on the PTS for provisioning. I'm a system integrator. I'm dealing with the latest version of the product. It's a very well-known solution, and it's very efficient. However, you need to dig deep into the architecture of it just to understand it and grasp it well, especially how things are calling one another, how things are operating inside the APIs and all the networking inside, and how things are working in the architecture to be able to work with Citrix and actually understand everything that's going on it. If you face any error, you'll be able to know the cause and easily go to the root cause. However, you must first understand the architecture, understand how things are calling one another, and how the networks play. Then, start step-by-step working on it, on the application itself. If you have good knowledge, you'll find working with it very easy. I'd rate the solution a seven out of ten based on the fact that we did rin into a lot of issues related to the firewall. Other than that, Citrix works fine.

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.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. Although the initial setup is complex, deployment is easy. We already have the images used for deployments of the virtual machines through Citrix Studio. The thin client already has an operating system that connects directly to the Citrix server. All we have to do is assign the virtual machines and deploy them. We currently have 97 users for the solution and are looking to increase that to 300. Two engineers are required to manage the solution. I recommend you test everything first before implementing this solution. We are facing issues with Microsoft Teams, and the presentations which have no option to share with Bijo and Ojo. You should also test the hardware, especially the USB devices.

I rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops nine out of 10. This is the leading solution in the world for remote work. Citrix has had the top remote display for the last 20 years, and there is a huge technological gap between Citrix and its competitors. However, Citrix doesn't have the same level of marketing as its competitors. Many times, people don't realize that Citrix is the best until they've deployed it. I recommend taking advantage of Citrix eLearning online courses. Four or five days of online training can help you overcome a lot of shortcomings, but you need two or three years of experience working with the Citrix system and infrastructure to be a system admin.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a complex solution. It requires many licenses in a big environment. Anyone considering the solution needs to assess and analyze the cost benefit. As a VDI solution, I do believe it is the best one out there. I would rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop an eight out of 10.

My advice to others is Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are good and secure, and they can use their infrastructure from anywhere and anytime. I rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops a ten out of ten.

You need to think about ADC. If you are planning a deployment in the cloud, you need to be well aware of what will work and what will not work with ADC. Otherwise, it will be difficult.

These days, Citrix lacks innovation, so I would rate the current product stack as an eight out of 10. If they innovate more features for more business use cases, and they try to take more users from on-prem to the cloud, with reduced pricing and better after-sales services, they will definitely get a 10 from me.

We haven't embraced thin clients or low-cost device computing yet. We were of two minds about whether to take full laptops or thin clients for access while working from home. We are experimenting with thin clients now, and the experience has been positive, but until now we have used only laptops. We are going to further test thin clients and then we'll be giving them to some of our users.

Our organization does not have a business relationship with Citrix. I cannot recall the exact version number I last used. It might have been 2106, however, I'm not sure. It was likely the latest version of the product. I would advise those considering the solution to buy a maintenance contract alongside the solution. What I've learned, not so much from Citrix, but all of the virtualization applications is no matter how well your system runs, somebody will ditch. You need to be prepared for that. I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

My advice would be to look at the options available and at your specific requirements. You need to find the best match for the overall integration of your ecosystem in terms of how it is with Office 365. And you may be using multiple SaaS solutions. The product you choose should be able to match all of those requirements. The biggest lesson is that, during COVID, Citrix has come in handy for us for working remotely. It's a good solution. The solution provides the flexibility of being used on most devices, but not on every device. It covers 80 to 85 percent of devices. In terms of the user experience, when we asked employees to work on the VDI, they were not entirely happy, considering the performance compared with a normal laptop or a desktop. But overall, the user experience is good, an eight or 8.5 out of 10. The solution has enabled us, as an organization, to embrace thin-client computing, but I wouldn't say we have seen savings as a result. Citrix cannot function alone for organizations that have Office 365 deployed. Office 365 forces you to pay for a lot of other solutions and services that Citrix also has to rely on.

I would rate Citrix seven out of 10.

My advice would be to test this solution and see if it meets your expectations. On a scale of one to 10, I would rate Citrix a seven.

There is a steep learning curve. In the Cloud-hosted Virtual Apps and Desktops model, as a general rule, there's a high learning curve. If you're going from only providing local assets to your clients, a local server, local workstations, and you're going straight into Virtual Apps and Desktops for the Cloud in Azure, really do your homework. Really learn the tool, really understand how it's supported because you'll save yourself a lot of trouble down the line if you do. If you've got the resources available, throw one person at cost analysis for Azure. So that at least one person in your organization really understands how much something is going to cost to deploy and keep running so that you can size your agreements correctly. If I could, I would rate Virtual Apps and Desktops an 11 out of 10. I will rate it a ten out of ten.

Make sure that you have data sources in-house to manage every problem because support may be useless. Make sure that you discuss well in advance and get written proof of what you are buying from Citrix, because there lies a risk not being able to work on your solution anymore from one day to another.

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.

If you're looking at implementing it, plan as best you can at all levels. Citrix has its consulting methodology for how to properly plan and deploy an environment. I've been in a lot of places where I haven't seen the planning phase happening. Planning goes a long way towards a successful deployment, because you test a lot of things during the testing phase of that, in particular. You see things that you wouldn't otherwise see if you just built it and threw it out there and said, "Hey, use this." You would run into a lot of problems that you wouldn't understand, things that need to be tweaked for any deployment, no matter where you're deploying it. There is a set of standard things that you need to do. Planning goes a long way towards making sure that it's not only accepted by your end users but that it's supportable. Access control comes into play because we have different Citrix environments for different regions and they don't really cross-talk. We do limit certain things to certain environments, or some things are only available from one environment. People from the other environments have to access it from a different environment, but to them it's seamless because they're all behind the same store-front environments.

There has been a lot of improvement in the application. We use the application for so many different things and areas of security. It is incredible what we can do with Citrix. It provides total transparency for us. Today, it does not provide the flexibility of being used on any device because we use it on enterprise laptops. However, in the past, users could use their personal computer. We covered a lot of ground, and it was totally transparent for us. We only asked, "Please install Citrix receivers," then the rest is transparent for the system engineer. It is not clear for this moment if we will increase the usage of Citrix, because we don't know where the user will be working going forward (at the office, home, or another country). I would rate it an eight out of 10. It's not only Virtual Apps and Desktops. Also, other products that I see from Citrix on the market are good. They look for the best performance solution for the end user.

The centralized policy control and distributed enforcement is an eight out of 10. It's complex to set up. When it comes to the security of intellectual property when remote employees are using the solution, I would also rate it at eight. You can protect your environment, but I don't know if you've got logs or things like DLP that can assist you to see what's being moved out of the environment. Citrix plays a part in our clients' business continuation strategies. We will continue to make use of it as is, because it's much easier to manage the environment, the access, and upgrades. We install the applications only on the application servers. It's secure and makes it easy to work from anywhere, and it makes it easy to lock down the environment. My advice would be to get a Citrix engineer to assist you with your architecture and to send your engineers on training.

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.

Make sure you do a proper assessment and plan the rollout properly. That will ensure that the product is a success. Understand what the use cases are and if the Citrix solution is the right use case for the problem that you have. Explain what the business value is, because sometimes it's difficult to explain that. User training is something that is important so that people understand how to use the product. This is important because the new way of working through one workspace is something that users still need to understand and get use to. It provides an integrated platform but I wouldn't say it does everything you need to do. It's a step in the right direction. The value that the security analytics bring is to ensure that there are no malicious attacks. You enable the product and you don't have to worry about it. You need to do some maintenance on it at times, but it improves security for you.

My advice would be to be patient. Each solution has its pros and cons. We use the following in protecting our environment: Citrix Gateway combined with users from Active Directory and RSA tokens, as well as Remote PC Access. I am able to use the solution from my private laptop, my company laptop, and I don't see any difference. I imagine the behavior should nearly be the same across other devices.

Just follow the guide. Our clients used the following for protecting their environment: Citrix Gateway/Single Sign-on; Citrix Secure Browser; Web/URL Filtering; Web App Gateway; Citrix Endpoint Management; Citrix ADC.

We're currently using the latest version of the solution. While we mostly work with on-premises deployments, we also occasionally handle cloud deployments as well. We have our internal Cloud offering. Form there, we have a managed data center and within our company's premises, the customers are just subscribing to services based on their need for virtual desktops. I would recommend the product. It's an industry leader in the VDI environment. Nobody can match their capabilities right now. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. If they had better capability testing, I might rate it higher.

My advice is to spend more time planning than you do implementing. Get what you need—the components that make up the solution—all agreed and lined up before you then commence the build work. I know that's really easy for someone like me to say, when you're under pressure and your organization needs something built very quickly. Therefore, to make sure that you generate the most benefit from your investment and you drive the features that really help, spending a little more time in the planning phase and making sure that you've got the right type of license, the right application or appliance required to do the job as this will save a lot of rebuild work or remodelling work down the line. It will also mean that if you want to grow it for scaling purposes, it will be far easier to do if you've thought about that before you implement the solution. One of the lessons I have learned from using this solution is the fact that we have been able to be agile and respond to the needs of the organization through the use of the product. That has been a very good side of things. Another side of the lessons learned is that when we paid for the upgrade to move to the premium suite, we could have engaged earlier with Citrix to understand the additional functionality. We knew ahead of time that there was additional functionality, but in terms of the detail, we didn't get into that and then we got overtaken by the pandemic. In a normal year that wouldn't have mattered, but the lesson I've learned is that if we take an upgrade in the future, if we take the next step forward to a next generation of that software, I want to try to ensure that the purchase and the training of my engineers are closely coupled. As for protecting our environment, we use Citrix Gateway, but the single sign-on is provided by another partner of ours. We have Tap and Go, Remote PC Access, Web App Gateway. We do have Web/URL filtering, but not from Citrix. In terms of maintaining the solution, I have resources at both 2nd and 3rd line engineering that have Citrix skills and who look after the day-to-day stuff. In addition we have a contract through a Citrix partner and so can escalate calls that we can't handle. We spent time and effort putting our engineers through Citrix training. But occasionally, something comes up and we're not able to resolve it. At that point, we log a call via the partner and the partner's engineers, and Citrix's own engineers, get involved. Normally that results in a relatively quick resolution. The Citrix engineers clearly know the product really well. They'll quite often say, "Oh, we've seen this before. You need to do this or that or the other." As I said, we've had very few issues with reliability on the Citrix platform so those calls are actually quite rare. Overall, I love it. It's been a really good product. It's helped my organization and helped me to deliver what the organization wants. For me, Citrix takes 10 out of 10. For example, right now I'm at home, and my connection to the hospital runs over the Citrix VPN that we've created. We also have Citrix Remote PC Access, so if you are home and you're on your own computer, rather than one that belongs to the hospital, you can access the published desktop rather than having full VPN access. We're a fairly big Citrix customer. We're doing some quite ground breaking stuff with them. We're beyond just being a customer. Traditionally, Citrix is positioned in the marketplace as a manufacturer. They sell through channels and the customer deals primarily with the partner. Because of the amount of work we've done, we primarily deal directly with Citrix themselves. There is a partner involved because that's the only way of doing the sales component of it, so if we want to buy something that has to be through the channel. But the work that we're doing is being done alongside engineers who are employed by Citrix rather than by the partner.

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).

You need to know your workloads very well. And that isn't something that you just know. So you should probably buy small, really small — smaller than you ever thought — and see what your workloads look like, and then grow into it. That's the key when it comes to sizing or implementations. Vendors generally want to come in and oversell you. They want to license you to the max for your number of projected users. That's really not necessary for a product like Citrix. The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is to start small and find a small success story with the particular use case. Then let that success speak for itself. The way that my team operated is that we had the core service offering to all 130,000 faculty, staff, and students. And then we started slowly coming along and doing these customized service offerings within the university for specialty areas. Once a particular group sees a successful deployment or operation, it just spreads. Today, we have many more use cases that are waiting to be onboarded to our platform. I don't have to go soliciting for that. The work and the experience speak for themselves. A lot of people who are just starting out with Citrix go straight to the cloud product. If it's your first introduction to the Citrix product family, that is the way to go. If you believe you have any use cases that will not likely move to the cloud — generally, those are some of your protected workflows — you can still give the product a try. Remember that the hybrid model is probably the most commonly used model that's out there today with this product family. For a remote solution and connectivity I think it's the best that there is on the market compared to the other two, big, competing products. It's definitely superior so I would give it a nine out of 10.

Citrix has its own training and certifications available, such as CCA-V, CCA-N, CCE-V,CCE-N. For anybody who is implementing this solution, I would suggest that they start with the training. That will help them with the product in learning what it is, how it is going to be implemented, what the requirements are, and so forth. The training is easy and once it is complete, implementing and using the solution will be easier for them. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Advice that I would give to people considering this solution is to use our model of implementation. I absolutely recommend using a local supplier who is knowledgeable and who has experience with the product and deployment because then you won't have any problems. We are only using it. We don't care how it is set up. We don't care about the model itself, but only that the result fits our requirements. This supplier is doing all the things we don't want to have to learn for us. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven-out-of-ten.

I would recommend this solution to other people. On a scale of 1 - 10 I would rate it an 8.

The advice I would give to those who want to start using this solution is to beware of Citrix and Microsoft. They are both considered sort of the bad guys in the computing world. They want to push you to the cloud and maybe you don't really need the cloud for your solution. You don't have to listen to them. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight.

What we would like to do in the future is to have a VDI solution where we can give each user a desktop, but we aren't there yet. At this time, we are using this only with published applications. This solution is easy to manage, but we want to see what happens when we create a hybrid solution with Office 365. We will be moving to a cloud-based solution in perhaps two years from now. This is a good solution and if it is suitable for the environment then I would recommend it. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

My advice is to use Citrix XenApp on Windows VMs, based on VMware Hypervisor.