Delivering a great employee experience has always been critical to recruiting and engaging talented workers. With the rising popularity of hybrid work models, your employees expect an optimal work experience from anywhere and on any device. Desktop as a service (DaaS) solutions are a popular and cost-effective way to enable anywhere access to business apps and desktops, so ensuring the best possible user experience on DaaS remains essential.
You chose Citrix DaaS to deliver this seamless and secure work experience wherever your employees choose to work. By taking advantage of all the available features, tools, and best practices within Citrix DaaS, you can provide a fast and seamless employee experience while also simplifying IT management and improving costs. Let’s take a closer look at four key features in Citrix DaaS that simplify and speed the end user experience.
How Citrix DaaS CPU Optimization Delivers a Consistent User Experience
Because DaaS delivers virtual applications and desktop services to employee devices, whenever employees use your DaaS infrastructure they are sharing the same CPU resources. Sometimes, individual user instances can monopolize the CPU and use far more than their fair share of computing power. Known as the “noisy neighbor” problem, this can lead to sluggish app interactions, slow logons, and long launch times for applications — in short, a worse user experience for everyone.
Citrix DaaS addresses the noisy neighbor problem with intelligent CPU optimization. This automatically monitors each process to find instances that are monopolizing CPU resources, then dynamically lowers the CPU priority for such processes. The result is a consistent user experience for all employees who rely on your DaaS and VDI platform.
Using RAM Optimization to Improve App Performance and Drive Productivity
Similar to the shared use of CPU resources across employee devices, employees also rely on the same system memory whenever they use your DaaS infrastructure. In addition to memory usage increasing over the workday as users launch more apps, processes and services running in the background also consume RAM. Apps that become idle can also fail to release RAM back into the shared system. The result is too little available memory to go around for all the employee virtualization instances, which leads to poor performance and user frustration.
To keep your virtual environments running smoothly throughout the workday, Citrix DaaS intelligently optimizes memory across your DaaS infrastructure. This works by continually monitoring memory usage by each process — whether it was just launched by an employee or if it is running in the background. Whenever a process goes idle, that application’s working set of RAM is placed back onto the disk to free it up. This RAM optimization ensures active applications always have enough resources to function properly and your employees have the best possible user experience to be productive wherever they work.
Why Logon Optimization Is Crucial to a Great User Experience
Every employee’s first impression of your DaaS user experience is when they first log on. To deliver a smooth and speedy logon experience, you want the desktop interface to be as fast and intuitive as possible. However, there are often numerous windows operations that must happen to set user preferences and execute logon scripts. This tends to complicate and slow the logon process, which can frustrate employees right as their workday is beginning.
Here’s how the logon optimization inside Citrix DaaS improves the experience of logging in. Any environmental operations (such as drive mapping and log on scripts) are moved out of the initial logon process and applied when the desktop interface initializes. Each employee still receives their unique mapping and preferences, but now they are applied within a much faster logon experience. This helps start every user’s experience on the right foot.
How to Use Privilege Optimization Inside Citrix DaaS
The principle of least privilege is a key information security concept for DaaS and VDI environments. Because these environments share resources across many users, the principle of least privilege holds that each user is granted the minimal privileges needed to do their work. But there are always exceptions. Developers might need to install certain dev tools to be more productive, or users might need to run a command or powershell script. This requires an easy way for your IT team to grant elevated privileges to these users — otherwise the IT experts will have to step in and manually perform these safe but tedious tasks every time.
Enter privilege elevation inside Citrix Daas. This privilege optimization feature enables admins to easily grant elevated privileges as needed from a secure file share. For example, an admin could elevate a developer’s privileges so they could install defined dev tools that were needed for their work. This helps keep your users happy and productive while maintaining the stability of your DaaS environment.
To learn more about the features in Citrix DaaS that improve your user experience while simplifying IT management and improving costs, watch these videos.
