Why Customers are Moving Citrix Based Windows Desktops and Applications to AWS Cloud

In today’s dynamic environment agility is the basis of business. Organizations must be responsive to cope with fast changing regulatory requirements, highly fluctuating economic conditions, evolving consumer habits and disruptive business models. Monolithic infrastructure is unable to support the needs of rapidly changing business requirements and so organizations are adopting public Cloud to become inherently agile.
Traditional IT set ups are often besieged with sprawling infrastructure with large server farms and hundreds of users accessing the network across multiple devices. Managing such an environment along with the threat of shadow IT and isolated, forgotten servers make enterprise security an administrative nightmare. Yet the role of technology is crucial to enable business agility and adaptability.

Cloud is helping organizations modernize the way IT services are delivered and there is a surge in moving Windows desktop and applications on Citrix to AWS Cloud. Citrix Cloud enables digital workspace and delivers apps, data and desktop in real time on any device, with unified endpoint management (UEM).
Citrix is a leader in the Virtual desktop Infrastructure market with 53% market share according to VDI Like a Pro End User Computing, 2019. As a market leader Citrix has pioneered the migration of virtual Windows environments to the Cloud partnering with AWS. These efforts have resulted in two innovative concepts—secure perimeter and digital workspace. Citrix secure perimeter recognizes the consumerization of IT and identifies the user as the new perimeter. While its digital workspace is an integrated technology framework designed to facilitate employee productivity by enabling secure access to applications and data in real-time on any device, at any location via Cloud services or through the datacenter.

So, what are the benefits of moving Citrix-Windows workloads to AWS Cloud

Citrix and AWS have partnered since 2010 to enable reliable, scalable and secure alternative to on-premise deployments of Citrix solutions and workloads.

Specific benefits of deploying Citrix on AWS Cloud include the following:

• Quick access to on-demand resources such as compute, database, network on AWS Cloud without incurring huge upfront costs or long deployment cycles. Scale up or down resources to reduce costs and meet elastic user demand.
• Reduce risks with high availability, scalability and performance using AWS Regions & Availability Zones along with autoscaling to make Citrix Workspace highly available and scalable globally.
• AWS Cloud Formation templates for Citrix enable to deploy virtual apps and desktop services quickly and easily by automatically provisioning infrastructure and Auto Scaling groups. Basic Windows PowerShell scripts for Windows-based EC2 instances are available to kickstart deployment.
• Securely host Citrix application and deliver applications to end devices by leveraging AWS VPC. You can segregate network into public and private subnets and use security groups to define and monitor policies—control where data resides, who can access and what they can do with it.
• Citrix Application Delivery Control (ADC) is natively integrated with AWS Outpost to help customers who have latency-sensitive applications or are bound by compliance regulations to deploy apps on premises. Customers can bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to on-premise using same Citrix ADCs, AWS APIs, tools, and infrastructure across on premises and AWS Cloud for a consistent hybrid experience.
• Citrix tools such as CloudBridge Connector enables to provision and deploy desktops and applications using existing access methods. Citrix licensing, management and authentication can be integrated with existing on-premise tools to establish secure connectivity between AWS Cloud and on-premise resources.

Citrix Workspace on AWS delivers users a seamless experience while enabling IT to simplify control via unified platform. AWS complements Citrix Workspace by providing a global footprint and a choice of EC2 instances optimized to meet performance needs of any workloads. Citrix and AWS have collaboratively prepared The AWS Quick Start for Citrix ADC to enable easy migration by automating configuration and reducing time, costs and skills involved.

Umbrella is a Citrix Platinum Partner and AWS Premier Consulting Partner—both elite category status. We have large teams of certified Citrix and AWS professionals, equipped to migrate Citrix workloads to AWS with extensive experience migrating more than 400 workloads to AWS Cloud.

If you are interested in moving your existing Windows Desktops and Applications based on Citrix solutions to AWS Cloud or want to know more about it, reach out to us.