Citrix and Microsoft have a complicated history, but they’ve recently taken their relationship to new heights by announcing an extension of their partnership to help businesses better manage a remote workforce.
Since the pandemic began, CIOs have been looking for ways to bring the office experience to the home and in the process put their enterprises anywhere. At the same time, CFOs are wondering just how to do so with the evolution of OpEx subscription options.
The recently announced collaboration between Microsoft and Citrix is meeting those needs.
Reducing Complexity Across Remote Workspaces
The pandemic has caused entire workforces to go remote. It has left IT teams scrambling to support the businesses while ensuring the newly formed remote workforces have consistent and secure ways to access desktop environments.
The new partnership aims to offer better desktop standardization for remote user endpoints, something more critical now than ever. Now each remote worker has an independently unique network experience—something which is traditionally not easy to connect to in remote environments.
When an employee, customer, or supply chain partner is using technology supplied by their employer, IT teams have some control over the commonality of CPU, memory, and other aspects affecting the performance of applications. However, with the rapid transformation to remote work, many employees are using machines that IT teams can’t directly service.
Citrix specializes in normalizing the interface, creating a consistent service abstraction from endpoints, and reducing the complexity of IT management by enabling solutions to offer the same, familiar desktop across a number of locations.
But while reducing complexity across IT endpoints is a critical part of our new normal, so too is adapting to increased security concerns.
Meeting New Security Needs
The partnership between Microsoft and Citrix will also improve security governance. Microsoft is selecting Citrix Workspace as a preferred digital workspace, and Citrix is choosing Microsoft Azure as a preferred cloud platform. This will help standardize desktop configuration and policies for improved security governance while also reducing the cost of analysis and configuration.
Additionally, IT teams need established and connected road maps for consistent, flexible, and secure work experiences. Citrix and Microsoft are creating a road map to allow organizations to deliver and manage a larger set of services, including Citrix Workspace, Citrix SD-WAN, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft 365. These road maps also launch a fresh copy of the OS, making it harder for viruses and ransomware to gain a foothold.
Monitoring for the Future of Remote Work
For companies migrating to Azure, this partnership should be music to their ears. It makes it incredibly easy to attach Citrix delivery costs to existing Azure invoices, and it provides added scale-out flexibility. Smaller businesses may also be able to use virtual desktops, depending on the complexity of their services and how they match up to what Azure provides. Regardless, it will be imperative to monitor your Citrix environment and, with Azure delivery, equally critical to configure cloud resource monitoring in your dashboards. And there’s no reason not to do so; it’s easier now than ever before to integrate accurate cloud infrastructure monitoring with mature solutions, making the transition easy. With cloud adoption experiencing exponential growth, it will be important for IT teams to use monitoring tools to better manage costs. Consumption-based billing can shed light on unused resources, sprawl, and the resource-sizing guesswork that often creates unexpected invoice consequences. Organizations need broad monitoring to ensure businesses are only paying for what they’re using. Monitoring will help businesses accurately measure how they’re using custom apps and deliver better insight into whether they’re delivering acceptable user experiences with as few resources as possible.
The “new normal” has IT teams assessing virtual desktop and applications delivery options as never before. The Microsoft- Citrix partnership and entry into the Azure marketplace exemplify a transformation in how SaaS is becoming part of this new normal.