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

MB
CIO at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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

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

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JV
CEO at Lucid Tech Services

There have been radical improvements in IT efficiency. Cost savings are on a case-by-case basis. Some of my clients were not going all-in on any kind of management solution, so their initial monthly cost was higher when they went to Citrix. In most cases, it's a push. They're spending about the same money in either direction. But in a lot of cases, when you start to factor in the cost of downtime, the cost of inefficiency, the cost of a data breach, everyone is realizing much lower costs of management and ongoing costs to their IT department.

It's difficult to approximate how much it has saved because on one hand, I have a client that has 45 or 50 users and they realized a much higher increase of efficiency. A task in the previous model took half an hour, and under the new model, it takes five minutes.

When you spread that over 50 employees, that's a much higher percentage of drop than if a client has 10 employees. It's difficult to approximate but averaged across all of our clients, there is around a 25-to-30% reduction in costs.

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IA
Group IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It provides the flexibility of being used on any device. It is good in terms of user experience. Generally, if you want to run an application over the internet on your virtual desktop, you need to have many things working well to have the same experience that you will have if you were are working on your own laptop. It provides a good user experience in terms of working even with not-so-high bandwidth.

There is end-to-end security not only for the application itself but also for the users. We need to ensure that the applications are always protected and the connection between the user and the application is also protected. 

Integration with the cloud provides a seamless experience. You can publish applications over the cloud, and you can access the workspace and your application on your computer, your laptop, your tab or iPad, or on mobile devices. It works well with your Apple, Android, or Windows devices. It works with everything. There is also a system where you can remotely assist any person who is running any specific application.

There is good integration between Citrix and Microsoft applications. You can also optimize the user experience with certain configurations. Security plays a very important role in working with Citrix in terms of dealing with group policies, legal policies, and application policies. You can apply the required policies. For example, you can have a clipboard policy where people cannot copy or screenshot stuff.

It is very easy when it comes to the deployment and management of hybrid cloud apps and desktops. You are working only in one console, and it is straightforward. You can see everything there. You can see the policies, rules, profiles, and whether you want to have it on the cloud or on-prem.

When it comes to the security and protection of critical business applications and desktops, 
there are certain business applications that some companies prefer not to publish or not to have on virtual desktops in the cloud. However, when we're talking on-premises solution, it can integrate with any published application. If you're working on certain projects or certain versions, you will not have any issues in terms of the version because the configuration is based on the server and not on the client PC. For example, some Oracle application or ERP application needs certain plugins to be available, and users didn't have those on their laptops. In spite of not having them, they were able to work on these applications through a virtual desktop.

It simplifies adherence to industry regulations for data protection and compliance with all kinds of security policies. 

It benefits the overall business operation and reduces the total time of managing big applications. The applications are available at any time of the day. Previously, if anyone lost his computer or had his computer damaged or something like that, we had to take that computer and reinstall everything for a staff member to be able to access the application, whereas now, the staff member can access the application through his phone or another computer. His information is there on the service from any place. So, it impacts the availability of applications, and it saves a lot of time to replace a damaged PC. In certain cases, it also saves a lot of cost of buying new Windows or new hardware for the applications, so we can use old laptops to run these applications. It saves time and money.

It saves the cost of buying new PCs and the maintenance. It saves 50% to 60% of the total cost of a new device that needs to be bought for any new employee or for a specific service. It saves a lot of money and reduces wastage.

It provides security of our intellectual property and data when remote employees are using the solution. The main thing is that you can create your own policies and you can specify what applications users can run based on the locations. For example, if they are working in Dubai, they don't need to access all data in Lebanon. We can create profiles and policies for them. In the group configuration, you can just integrate it with Active Directory or another security platform so that the configuration can be applied to the region.

It is very efficient to work with a thin client. There are no problems with integration with various devices.

We're running it on-prem. We are working with Hyper-V and vSphere, and we don't have any problem with that. We can run any server and storage. It can work with any hypervisor. There are no restrictions.

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Buyer's Guide
Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SC
Manager of Virtualization Services at a university with 10,001+ employees

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

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

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

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

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

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RV
Delivery Head - Major Incident at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The main benefits include:

  • enhanced security,
  • return on investment since we're only delivering applications,
  • flexible work hours for remote employees, and
  • ensuring data and applications are always accessible and
  • availability of the systems.

The challenge is that people don't want to take their data or applications from the data center. When I need to deliver an application or data securely to a laptop connected to the Internet, or to someone working from home who may not be able to have the application installed due to GDPR or compliance issues, or because the laptop or desktop lacks the power to run those applications or process that data, in this situation, Citrix DaaS allows for secure delivery over the Internet without exposing it to the rest of the world, keeping it within the data center.

To integrate Citrix DaaS with other infrastructure components, such as Active Directory, which is an integral part, and other applications like SaaS or the printing system, these need to be locally installed or packaged and delivered to our Citrix infrastructure. 

The integration depends on various factors:

  • type of applications, 
  • connectivity, and 
  • actual business use case driving that integration. 

So, it's quite subjective, but it largely depends on these factors.

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Alan Thomas - PeerSpot reviewer
Technological Solutions Architect at Grupo Techint, S.A. de C.V.

We had an old software that our servers did not support. So we moved to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for cyber engineering in India and Mexico.

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MA
Senior Manager, Corporate IT at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The only reason why I use it is I may need to access my files from anywhere that I am and where I cannot install a VPN to my place or anything else. I have managed to secure it enough to know that my files will always be accessible no matter where I am. I wouldn't use it otherwise.

I perform security tests with external providers.

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RM
Technical Team Lead at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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GD
Manager - IT/Telecommunications at Banco Galicia

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.

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HL
Head of Corporate Strategic Alliance and Partnership at LG Uplus

First, since we adopted the Citrix VDI, we are no longer dealing with the problem of leaking the customer's personal information. Second, we aren't investing a lot of money in buying new personal laptops. With the VDI, we aren't relying on a high-core CPU or memory in each employee's laptop. Because the functions that require a lot of memory and CPU are happening in the cloud, we can just give the employee a basic Pentium CPU laptop.

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JB
Senior Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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ED
Works at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

There was a scenario where a user built very small films for internal communication on his laptop via the VPN using the NAS file system. It's not the best solution. This takes around 45 minutes. With this use case, we installed all the tools on Citrix. Now, the user can build his film in a maximum of two minutes. It was an incredible improvement for the user. Today, this is the best case of Citrix usage for end user experience, using the full capabilities of the server in the data center.

Our organization supports Zero Trust as a security strategy. However, the Zero Trust strategy in the bank is done via the VPN. Also, all laptops connected out of the bank are via VPN. We don't use the full Citrix landscape to do this today.

For all applications in the bank, we set up Active Directory groups to have access rights. All users can access a lot of applications, but the rights are given one by one for each application. Therefore, it's very centralized at the Active Directory level.

The business continuity plan was 100 percent based on Citrix and the client. Today, it is a little different because everybody has a laptop, but the main applications are still available on Citrix. This offers the more flexible possibilities of managing business continuity plans and performance everywhere for end users.

In Luxembourg, a user can use business applications with Citrix inside the building. Then, outside the building, that user cannot use the business applications because we cut the usage of Citrix.

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MS
Systems Architect at Conviso Inc.

The solution was perfect for expanding the environment to host more remote access users during the pandemic.

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Rey Mendoza - PeerSpot reviewer
Desktop Support Supervisor at Emirates Steel.

We are using the solution with some of our light users. There is less maintenance cost for the hardware.

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DK
Technical Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Before we used the solution, when an employee would join our company it would take us between seven and 14 days to completely configure and give them a laptop. Now, within a maximum of one day they get their computer and can start working on that system. It has simplified things for us.

The solution also simplifies our adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. For data protection, we have watermarking enabled and the solution opens in full-screen mode so that end-users cannot toggle between VDA and their desktops. The solution also disables use of the clipboard to copy data from the VDA desktop to an endpoint device. Moreover, there is an option to disable even taking a screenshot of the virtual desktop. All of these features help with data protection.

For compliance, we have our own URL to access our desktop server. We can also create a tenant-based method for deploying the virtual desktop for each project, and we can group them. Also, the communication between the endpoint and the virtual desktop is encrypted end-to-end. All communication is over SSL and TLS connections.

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HS
Deputy General Manager at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees

The solution simplifies adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. Overall, from a cyber security point of view, in terms of data leakage as well as patches and upgrades that are required to be deployed to multiple endpoints, Citrix makes it very simple. That clearly helps in terms of mitigating risks at a very early stage.

The security of our intellectual property and data is enhanced because of the roles we have defined very precisely. People only have access to the data they are supposed to have access to.

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JG
Citrix Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provides the flexibility of being used on any device, which makes it easier to work for many anywhere. The transition from people working in an office every day to working from home was seamless, for the most part for us, because almost everybody has a personal computer, whether it's a PC or a Mac. We had a lot of people go out and buy Chromebooks and any other type of device that they saw fit for themselves. They just logged in to our portal and launched their desktops, like they always would. It's very flexible.

The biggest benefit was when we had that transition when offices were closed due to the pandemic. We had thin clients in the offices, so people were already using Citrix whether they were in the office or not. The flexibility provided by that alone was invaluable, in just getting people able to work from home. That's what the product is supposed to do. We didn't really have work-from-as a model. People could do it, but it wasn't a big thing for us. It was more along the lines of when you were done for the day you went home, and if you had to log back in, you could. But for the most part, people were done with work until the next day.

Citrix also plays a part in our business continuity strategies. We have in-house applications and, since we have data centers in various regions, we need the ability for a given application to be live in other data centers, even though we only currently have it running from one. vSphere is the platform that we use for virtualization so we have infrastructure that's the same in every data center. We have a Citrix environment just for DR that we can copy our vDisks into, in Provisioning Services, from one data center to the next. We can then just spin up a Citrix desktop that has access to that DR environment. The other teams then spin up their pieces of infrastructure within that DR bubble and test it. Citrix gives people the ability to quickly get into that DR environment once it has been stood up.

Another aspect is that the solution has resulted in IT efficiencies because we can be pretty agile with quickly reverting changes and quickly implementing new changes. It provides a lot of flexibility for us.

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it_user271662 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead Global Engineering at Interpublic Group (IPG)

We have a lot of users in remote locations and some have slow, high-latency connections. So deploying XenDesktop as a VDI solution to connect to our data center overcame the challenges of having remote users and addressed the slow and high latency issues we used to experience prior to deploying Citrix.

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RohitSaluja - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and Director at Decoding IT Solutions LLC

The biggest benefit of using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is that all of the company's applications and data are situated on one centralized server, removing the need to install applications on the users' physical desktops or laptops. Whenever we want to access anything, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops provides a seamless experience that lets us connect to our apps and files from anywhere. It's much like having a virtual office.

This arrangement also improves IT security because it ensures that no potentially-unsafe data will be downloaded on the end-points.

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PH
IT Director at a legal firm with 51-200 employees

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.

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YG
IT Operations Service Delivery Senior Manager at e-finance

It increased the no. of users and reduced traffic and data connection cost in addition to increased user productivity.

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RV
Delivery Head - Major Incident at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The solution has improved over time. For example, one of the functionalities that has been incorporated into the latest versions is the Local Host Cache. Another improvement is zones. There is also something called Local Text Echo that was introduced with version 7.9 or 7.11. These features have helped us to adapt the product within different customer organizations and within our own organization as well.

Additional benefits the solution has provided are work from home and bring your own device. These have made us more efficient in terms of being able to work wherever we want and through whatever device we'd like to work on. Encouraging people to work from home and reducing dependency on fat clients, like laptops and desktops, and providing them with thin clients or zero clients, we'll be able to save on costs. With fat clients, the renewal cycle is around three to five years, whereas the renewal cycle for thin clients or zero clients is around seven to 10 years.

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Nicholas Stapley - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Architect offering Consultancy Services and Technical Governance at Various Clients
  • It has enabled remote working from anyplace, anytime, and anywhere
  • It has simplified, secured, and centralized the challenges of O/S deployment across the enterprise.
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EP
Senior Technical Consultant at The Instillery

One of our clients where we implemented XenDesktop has a highly mobile fleet of users, and providing access to shared desktops either via Wyse terminals or tablets has really shown what a difference in improving efficiency and reliability can do to a system. What we love the most about XenDesktop is the simple and easy way to scale on-demand depending on the workload.

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it_user166788 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Engineer at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

You can manage all devices and users in your company. You can respond rapidly to user requests. If you use the thin client, you can save energy.

You can simulate disaster scenarios for our virtual world and you can increase your virtual security.

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Robert Prugarewicz - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Specialist at Unum Życie Towarzystwo Ubezpieczeń i Reasekuracji Spółka Akcyjna

From my perspective, when the COVID pandemic occurred, and the whole company had to work remotely, the users who used this solution had a better feeling that the remote system is stable and reliable, in comparison with a regular VPN connection with a VPN client. The difference with Citrix is that only the things you move on your screen, like the mouse and keyboard keys, are transmitted. In a normal VPN connection, the whole connection to the network resources in the company are transmitted and this costs bandwidth. The Citrix solution is much more convenient for the user.

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YG
IT Operations Service Delivery Senior Manager at e-finance

This solution has improved user productivity all over Egypt serving the Government financial system. The bandwidth used by the applications was dramatically reduced from 60K to 8K per user. This reduction in bandwidth had reduced the connection cost for the whole project.

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it_user482313 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project Manager at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

In this case it was an upgrade from XenMobile 8.6 so it was an upgrade to maintain support from the vendor. The main areas of improvement would be around reporting and integration with ShareFile and access to the Worx suite of mobile applications (WorxMail, WorxWeb, WorxNotes).

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it_user101136 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Director at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

In the past, when we were using the presentation server from Citrix, login time was taking up to eight minutes. XenDesktop reduced login time to less than two minutes. Managers who move around can take their work at any point in time to a new location without having to login from scratch. That increased productivity.

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MM
Sr. System Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Our clients were very happy with the technology because they could continue with their work. For example, one of our customers had headquarters and branches. All users in the branches were using Citrix Virtual Apps and they were very happy because they could work from the branches. It helps the company or the environment to centralize all its resources and allows all users from all the branches to reach those resources without needing them in every branch. It saves costs, operations, and maintenance—everything.

It's a very useful solution for on-premise environments because it creates flexibility by serving the resources and providing accessibility to users who are far away.

In addition, when remote users are using the solution it provides security for the organization's intellectual property and data.

The solution provides everything in one integrated platform, which is great for our customers.

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DW
Senior Manager of Engineering at Mechanics Bank

It has allowed us to provide network/application resources to anyone anywhere, no matter what kind of device the end user had, we were usually able to find a compatible Citrix receiver app.  That gave our user base flexibility to be anywhere and still be productive.

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SD
Citrix/VMware Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Your servers are in a remote location, but your server is in UK and you are operating from Australia (theoretically). In this case, you want only Outlook to be used by your end users, therefore what you do is virtualize an Outlook from the servers located in the UK, but your users are using it in Australia as if it is in their local machine. It would be as if the user is utilizing Outlook in his/her machine, but it is running on the servers located in the UK.

This is an app. It virtualizes the application on your desktop. Supposing you have to enter it, you need to login and you will see the Outlook icon on the console. Outlook will open in your system, but the server is in the UK, which is utilizing the resources. Not your local resources, but those in the UK, the UK servers.

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it_user221403 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Mgr at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees

We have a large number of Mac users who need access to Windows programs. We tried many methods for allowing them to work from the Macs, including connecting them via remote desktop to physical Windows computers. This solution removes the troubles we had with VPN, single-use VMs and/or dedicated physical machines.

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it_user90339 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees

My organization is a 24x7 organization. About 2/3 of our users work a schedule that is 48 hours on, 96 hours off on rotating shifts and many of them live a minimum of 70 miles away. They frequently need to get into our computer system to adjust their work availability schedule for overtime and out-of-area deployments, as well as to keep in contact with other divisions that are on more-regular work schedules. We can now access our system in the field, which is valuable when interfacing with our constituency.

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MR
Controller at a translation and localization position with 51-200 employees

The solution helps us with our ERP.

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KG
Managing Director at a tech services company

One of the benefits is that our clients can work from anywhere. It's all consolidated in one environment. It makes it easy for them as things easily accessible from any environment.

It provides the flexibility of being used on any device which makes the employee experience better, in terms of ease of use.

We've also set up access according to security group so it's very secure. We can lock down the environment completely.

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it_user70641 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization, Remote Access and Mobility Engineering at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our organization was a VMView shop. Due to issues with application responsiveness / perceived performance, our users had a very negative perception of the technology and were opting for physical PCs instead of VDI. During an extended pilot with these users leveraging Citrix XenDestop, we were able to improve the perceived performance / application response time, as well as use significantly less bandwidth. This was a huge cost savings for the firm.

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it_user81906 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Sales Leader on IBM Cloud, MBA at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Mobility! You can access your virtual desktop with all your applications everywhere; with a smartphone, laptop, thin client and so on.

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DA
Implementation and Support Engineer at PRACSO S.R.L.

In terms of the employee experience, I would say I think Citrix is quite good. It has also helped us to comply with industry regulations on data protection by allowing us to maintain our target policy of controlling clients' access to information. 

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it_user200937 - PeerSpot reviewer
System & Network Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • This product can reduce the cost of a user environment, but only if all components are included for a migration to a Citrix environment.
  • A Citrix environment can increase the security by centralizing and controlling the user environment.
  • The application deployment was also accelerated.
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SS
Assistant Manager - IS Infrastructure at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

We have 12 offices around the island, and users able to connect to the same desktop and access their apps and files from any of these locations. Road warriors get access to the insurance apps on their mobile devices of any OS.

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SS
Assistant Manager - IS Infrastructure at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

We have 12 offices around the island, and users are able to connect to the same desktop and access their apps and files from any of these locations. Road warriors get access to the insurance apps on their mobile devices of any OS.

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SN
CTO at Greenware Technologies LLC

XenApp made our Application environment secure and restrict the data transfer.

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it_user197484 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator with 501-1,000 employees

This was a breakthrough for us; we reduced our user base from 2000 client machines with Windows OS and all applications installed on all computers and so on, to 40 application servers and 2000 thin clients that don’t need any management. If one has a problem, it’s replaced.

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it_user283545 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We can create desktops per project.

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VC
CEO at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

A lot of people are going to a hybrid working model and they can work in the same environment, whether they're at home or in the office. They're able to work efficiently.

Security is also of critical importance. It provides a very secure environment with several security features that can be implemented. We are an IT infrastructure company, so infrastructure passwords are very critical. It provides us with a tremendous amount of security, which is very valuable.

Citrix also simplifies adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance.

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it_user174318 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

A cements customer uses the application for truck shipments from the United States by connecting to the infrastructure in Colombia, as the solution can only be found in that country.

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it_user212976 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Assistant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It has accelerated the process in which a new employee is given the necessary tools. We have contacted people in different countries that no longer have to wait for the central team to grant access to their PC in our environment. Assigning them a VDI user allows them to start right away.

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JS
Sys Eng at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

It allows our users to connect back up to a central location for our data center to do away with individual desktop controls.

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it_user613110 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant

We implement this solution at many customer sites. It directly affects the productivity and gives the customers a very flexible solution.

The customers have the possibility to provide access to their applications and data, but its data won’t leave their data centers.

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FS
Senior Consultant/Project Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The product has allowed the organisation to provide VDs for external users to access internal resources and manage them.

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it_user330321 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The product improves how our organization function because it is simple and can be centrally managed.

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it_user334560 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

It gives our business departments the ability to be mobile.

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MS
IT Infrastructure Analyst at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

XenDesktop has helped our users to work remotely with a better user experience.

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UD
‎Database Administrator with 51-200 employees

It has improved delivering applications to remote locations with its lower bandwidth utilization. It gives better performance to the user though the lowest bandwidth.

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it_user560277 - PeerSpot reviewer
Citrix Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

We are using this to allow our users to access applications over a secured, remote environment. It has helped to reduce the outages in our IT infrastructure, especially during server maintenance.

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it_user90252 - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Specialist at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

This product has improved my organization by provide access to the Intranet application and website over the internet over SSL from any device.

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it_user311946 - PeerSpot reviewer
Citrix / Virtualization Pre-Sales and Implementation Engg. at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

XenApp has helped many of my customers with remote access of applications, access on different platforms.

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Buyer's Guide
Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.