Enterprise IT is increasingly hybrid and multi-cloud with companies looking to tap into the business benefits different cloud platforms are offering them. Without platform-independent solutions for every new platform, the administrative burden can increase to the extent it can annihilate the business case. Unique image management solutions from Citrix ensure that adding a platform doesn’t increase the administrative load, thus giving you the true freedom to choose the platform that best fits your organization.
Today, one thing companies and organizations have in common is their journey to the cloud. But the schedule and choice of cloud or clouds varies greatly from company to company. That is why Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop services give you the freedom to choose either the cloud or an on-prem infrastructure and the ability to move to cloud at a pace that best supports your business.
Every OS vendor, hyper-converged Infrastructure, virtualization platform or cloud offers its platform-specific processes and tools to provision and manage images. When using a ‘single vendor infrastructure’ approach, it can still be manageable, but when moving to hybrid solutions, the administrative burden multiplies. There are some vendors that offer to continue using the same on-prem tools and methods in the clouds, but that can radically limit your choice of platform.
Microsoft Azure Government and Azure Germany
Many of our customers are operating in an area where they have to adhere to strict regional or business-specific regulations and policies. That is why we have recently expanded our Control Plane to Asia Pacific, thus making it available in all geographies: Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. Earlier in the year, we also added Tech Preview for creating Resource Locations in Microsoft Azure Government and Azure Germany clouds, supporting our customers that need to run their workloads in clouds that fulfill regional laws and regulations in order to stay compliant. We are planning to make this capability generally available by the end of next quarter.
Today, at Citrix Synergy in Anaheim, we took the next step with announcing the intent to also offer the XenApp and XenDesktop service management plane from Azure Government. This allows customers that require even higher security and stricter regulation standards to build an app and desktop virtualization solution that is completely hosted within a government-grade public cloud. This will open the door to XenApp and XenDesktop as a cloud service for many in the Federal space and serves as a big step towards FedRAMP certification. This once again showcases our commitment to support Any Cloud, and to provide true freedom of choice to our customers. Pricing and availability are yet to be disclosed.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
For the choice to be real, you want to be able to use the same management tools and experience regardless of the infrastructure that you’ve chosen. Citrix image management and provisioning technologies give you true choice. No other vendor offers you the same provisioning tools and administrative interface whether you are running on bare metal, virtualized infrastructure or in the cloud. At Citrix, we keep adding to the list of supported clouds. Today, we are excited to announce new power management capabilities for workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This adds GCP to the list of XenApp and XenDesktop service cloud platforms which also includes Azure and AWS.
Citrix will continue to add support for additional cloud platforms based on customer demand. For example, we are actively working this quarter to finalize a solution guide that will show customers how to utilize provisioning capabilities on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Citrix App Layering
Supporting many platforms usually equals building and maintaining platform specific images, which means that each new platform increases the overall administrative burden of managing the environment, prohibitively affecting the business case. Leveraging Citrix App Layering industry-unique capabilities to build a layer of the platform specific drivers and tools, you can create platform-independent images that can be assembled dynamically by combining app layers with an OS and platform layer to be provisioned on the fly to thousands of users.
Today, taking one image for a specific platform and converting it to another still requires quite a lot of work. Citrix is working on ways to streamline and automate those tasks, making it even easier to move from on-prem to cloud and from cloud to cloud. Keep your eyes open for a Tech Preview coming later in the year!
For more than a couple of decades, Citrix has been dedicated to supporting any applicationover any networkon any device. In today’s multi-cloud world, we are extending that dedication to support any cloud – public, governmental, private or hybrid — enabling your freedom of choice!