The COVID-19 pandemic has created many new hurdles for our customers, while adding a layer of challenges for federal customers with strict security requirements. As a technical account manager (TAM) at Citrix, I support U.S.-based public sector accounts. Recently, I began gathering information on how each customer planned to monitor their in-office networks from home in case their IT staff had to stop coming into the office.
Usually, IT staffers are classified as essential personnel and are exempt from shelter-in-place mandates. Still, many of my customers have implemented work from home strategies to help flatten the curve while protecting employees and their families.
Here are some best practices I’ve seen my customers in the public sector use. Your Citrix team can implement these suggestions before or after employees begin working from home, and they’re great ideas to keep in mind as you do business continuity planning in the future.
Best Practices from the Field
Keep Your Environment Up to Date
- Customers with up-to-date, fully supported environments stress the least about outages and performance.
- You can use Citrix Cloud to keep your environments as agile as possible and augment your teams with Citrix Consulting Services. This helps with expedited adoption and quick resolution if issues arise.
- Looking ahead, focus on conducting regular stress tests and disaster recovery (DR) planning to help prepare for disruptive events.
Ensure Essential Staff Members Have Physical Access
- Coordinate with your physical security team to ensure that essential staff members have access to the facility 24/7 for monitoring, upgrades, and outages.
Designate Essential Employees and Define Roles and Schedules
- Most of my customers have designated roles for team members to help define how often each goes into the office and their responsibilities while there.
- If you must have a staff member on site full time, consider designating one person per day to go into the office.
- Consider the approach used by hospitals in hurricane-prone regions. They split staff into two teams: Team A is on site during the crisis, while Team B provides relief after the all-clear.
Change Management and Upgrade Schedules
- Malicious actors often try to use crises to take advantage of lax IT security, so it’s critical to stay current on updates and patches.
- Pre-existing capacity issues get amplified. Some of my customers are continuing improvements to their environment, while leaving scheduled change windows on the calendar. Many of our Priority Support customers rely on our scheduled support feature to gain direct access to an engineer for assistance during these maintenance windows.
- Many customers have implemented change freezes due to concerns that issues may arise during upgrades.
Rely on Existing Monitoring Systems
- Citrix has documentation on monitoring guidelines. Now is the time to either implement or optimize your monitoring strategy. Check out our resources on XenApp and XenDesktop 7.15 LTSR monitoring and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 LTSR monitoring.
In addition to these best practices my customers implemented to deal with this unprecedented situation, Citrix has published some great work-from-home content for employees who might still be adjusting to working from their dining room table.
- I’m working from home. Now what? Tips and tricks for remote work.
- Staying connected, productive, and engaged when working remotely
Questions? Tips? Lessons Learned?
Reach out to your technical account manager if you have any questions or would like to chat about other best practices to keep your Citrix deployment running smoothly. Don’t have a TAM? Contact us for more information.
Do you have tips and tricks your teams have implemented? How are they handing this transition? Let us know in the comments below.
