If your business is still using a Citrix farm to connect to handle your remote desktop workloads like accessing applications and corporate data on your network, you're behind the times. While Citrix might have been a good option years ago, there are far better cloud-based solutions available today like Azure Virtual Desktop, formerly known as Windows Virtual Desktop, that can support your modern workforce without all the headaches.
Here are 5 reasons it's time to move on from your legacy Citrix environment and embrace Azure Virtual Desktop Solution:
1. Your Citrix environment has performance issues. One of the biggest complaints about Citrix desktop infrastructure is that it's slow and super sensitive to latency. Because Citrix operates on shared infrastructure, performance is generally impacted. If you're constantly waiting on your applications to load, getting booted out of the system or losing your connection, your employees are too. With today's fast-paced business environment, you can't afford to have your employees waiting around for their systems to load. An IT strategy that relies on a legacy Citrix environment, even when it is not meeting you and your employees needs can have a major impact on customer satisfaction, result in loss of revenue and more.
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2. Citrix comes with High cost of ownership. Citrix licensing is very expensive and complicated. Not to mention the server hardware requirements that comes with-- the Citrix servers are big, they are expensive to buy, provision and operate. On top of that, if you are following industry best practices, they recommend buying at least 2 Citrix servers (many implementations have 3 or 4 servers running). Today's cloud-based tools like Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop for example, come at a much more affordable price point for small businesses and the experience is overall much better. With AVD, you don't buy or maintain any hardware-- Microsoft handles all of that for you -- reducing costs on average 50 to 60 percent less, per month per user, than Citrix. And Microsoft's prices will continue to go down as they continue to grow in popularity over the next few years.
3. Citrix is overly complicated. Citrix is a complicated beast that requires the coordination of several sub-systems (SQL, Active Directory, storage, etc.) to perform properly and deliver an optimal experience. Poor design or a failure to understand how any of these sub-systems impact Citrix performance consistently leads to a less than desirable result. Because of this, we see many environments that are not configured correctly, resulting in poor, buggy experience for users.
4. Potential security concerns with Citrix. Piggy backing off number three, when systems are difficult and time consuming to managed and upgrade, it's easy for IT to put off the ever-daunting task, which could potentially expose your business to vulnerabilities. When you choose a modern, cloud-based platform like Microsoft Azure, all of the system updates happen on the backend, so you never have to worry about this again. And when you partner with a Cloud Solutions Provider like ANP, they will make sure all of the security features are deployed across your entire environment and any additional tools and automation are implemented correctly and running as they should to significantly lower risk, and prevent a potential attack.
5. Better Virtual Desktop options out there. When you compare Citrix vs. today's modern, cloud-based desktop as a service (DaaS) solutions like Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), it's really no contest. With AVD, you get all the benefits of the cloud - scalability on demand, pay as you go pricing model, automatic updates and patches - without any of the headaches that come with your current Citrix environment. We are seeing many organizations that went through painful work-from-home experiences, finally transition to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). Microsoft has made great strides in the world of remote desktop with AVD. Especially with the Windows 10 Multi-Session option.
If you're still using Citrix environment to access your applications and files there is a better way! If you're interested in exploring ANP's Azure managed services, would like to learn more about what it would take to move your business to Azure Virtual Desktop, contact ANP today. We're happy to help you evaluate your options, or better yet, provide you with a cloud readiness assessment to get a full cost comparison and our recommendations on how to improve your business IT.