By now, you’re well aware — COVID-19 is a pandemic and almost everyone will be impacted in some way, shape, or form. As a full-time remote worker and Citrix employee who focuses on making work suck a little less, the last few months have been quite eventful. And at this point, not a day goes by that I’m not asked my opinion on how a customer can stand up Remote PC overnight or if whether a customer can add 50,000 new users to their existing Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops infrastructure (and they’re curious if it will “scale”). Because I’ve been talking with customers about a lot of the same stuff lately, I figured it’s time to do two things:
- Share my favorite business continuity planning (BCP) resources with the community.
- Host a special Citrix TIPs webinar (Wednesday, March 25, at 10 a.m. ET and 7 p.m. ET) to answer questions live.
Before I share my favorite BCP resources, a couple quick notes about the webinar. First, it’s not really going to be a webinar with planned content. We know you have burning questions and you need answers. So, we’ll open up the lines (and chat) immediately and start answering your questions straight away. It will be a free, full hour of live Q&A with some of our top resources from Customer Success. We weren’t going to do another Citrix TIPs webinar until after Citrix Synergy, but the circumstances clearly warrant it and it’s the right thing to do to help the community.
Now, here are some of the top business continuity, disaster recovery, and work-from-home resources that I’ve been sharing with customers and partners over the last few weeks:
- Citrix CEO David Henshall’s post is your first stop to understand what we’re doing as a company in response to COVID-19. Toward the end, we mention our new BC Assurance Program. If you’re curious what it entails, reach out to your Citrix rep to learn more.
- Your next stop is the new BCP page on our main website. This is where you can download our free whitepaper, which contains leading practices for how to maintain business continuity. This page also contains a link to David Henshall’s recent appearance on CNBC.
- Dan Feller just published a new tech brief on business continuity. It’s an easy read, and Dan has a knack for making complex topics easy to digest.
- A couple months ago, three very smart people collaborated on our new technical whitepaper on disaster recovery and BCP. And Michael Shuster, Kevin Nardone, and Martin Zugec just updated it. It’s lengthier and more technical, for sure, but it’s a must-read for all the architects out there extending their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments, architecting GSLB, adding a secondary site or data center, and more.
- In case you haven’t heard, Remote PC is one of the easiest and least intrusive ways we can quickly help organizations enable employees to work from home. The Remote PC Reference Architecture is a must-read if you’re going down this route. I also worked with Dan Feller to publish a new Remote PC Design Guide that goes into more complex deployment considerations.
- A couple of our top sales engineers — Scott Lane and Bryan Mann — just recorded a 50-minute webinar on workforce continuity. We even do a live demo of Remote PC at the end so check it out. Dan Feller also released a new Remote PC Tech Insight last week. It’s only eight minutes, and it’s an easy way to see the technology in action.
- Last but not least, unprecedented events such as COVID-19 could mean you might have a lot of new remote users very soon (or yesterday!). Some of these folks might not have even heard of Citrix let alone know how to use something like the Citrix Workspace app. So I’ve been sharing these end-user adoption kits that allow organizations to quickly create and customize instructions for new Citrix users (how to install our client, how to launch an app, etc.). These are even available in Word format here.
Now, let’s say you’ve gone through all these resources but you still have questions. Well, that’s where the Citrix TIPS webinar comes in. On March 25, I’ll round up some of the smartest folks I know to answer all your questions LIVE. Got a technical design question? A question about business strategy? We’ll take them all and attempt to answer everything. Our star-studded panel will feature:
- Dan Feller, Lead Technical Marketing Architect
- Ryan McClure, Lead Customer Success Architect
- Sarah Steinhoff, Lead Professional Services Architect
- Scott Lane, Distinguished Sales Engineer
- Nick Rintalan (me!), Principal Architect & Sr. Director of CS
Please register today and start thinking about any questions you might have. And if you have other good resources on BCP/DR/WFH, please share in the comments below. We hope the information we’ve shared above helps in the meantime, and I’m looking forward to connecting with you during the webinar.
