Flexibility in the cloud, and on-premises, with these new Citrix features

Meeting you where you are starts with building a solution that lets you use the service providers of your choice. We’ve made significant improvements to our connectivity features allowing you to use whatever vendor best fits your needs, and plan to continue to do so as part of our Destination: Hybrid product roadmap. Our recent feature releases have been aimed at improving flexibility and choice for both our cloud customers and on-premises customers. 

Citrix integrates with any cloud, data center, or hybrid environment for the flexibility to deliver any application, on any device. We continue to deliver features for Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS so you can manage existing data centers and new cloud capacity to fit your organization’s needs. The new features include security and functionality upgrades for Google, cost-saving, efficiency, and security for Azure, plus more packages on the marketplace and more scale for AWS.

If you use one cloud provider or multiple cloud providers, no matter what clouds you choose, Citrix powers your workload delivery. As we renew our commitment to providing you with the most flexible solution on the market with Destination: Hybrid, we’ve added features that let you do even more with the biggest cloud providers. Read on for more about the capabilities we have introduced over the past few months that you can leverage today to optimize your environments.

New Citrix Upgrades for Google Cloud

Security features for Google Cloud

Security and authentication are essential for any solution. Now, Citrix is making it easier for you to integrate authentication for Google Cloud with support for Google Identity Authentication. Your organization can use both native Google Identity accounts and Active Directory-backed accounts for Citrix Workspace authentication.

Plus, we now offer support for non-domain joined Citrix DaaS workloads with Workspace authentication configured to Google IdP. This applies to any organization that has invested in Google Workspace and Identity by eliminating the need for Active Directory and Cloud Connectors. This can save your organization time and money by simplifying deployments and reducing costs.  

Functionality upgrades for Google Cloud

We have not only enhanced security features on Google Cloud, but we’ve also been working on features to improve overall functionality so you get better results with Citrix and Google. This includes adding Citrix-prepared images for Google Cloud delivered at no cost from the Google Cloud Marketplace to ease admin configuration. We’ve also added a purpose-built Citrix DaaS for Google Cloud solutions that we released last year, and now you can also download a Citrix-configured Rocky Linux multi-session VDA directly from the Google Cloud Marketplace. 

We also introduced a Europe-based Citrix DaaS control plane for Google Cloud with data sovereignty. Organizations in Europe can now utilize the Citrix DaaS control plane running on Google Cloud hosted in Europe to meet the GDPR requirements. This EU-based control plane will improve data access, speed, and meet GDPR requirements for EU customers. Take a closer look at implementing Citrix Workloads on Google Cloud here. 

New Azure features 

Reducing Azure costs with Citrix features

We know the price of storage for Azure can add up quickly.  So we introduced a feature to reduce your storage spending by up to 50 percent, for a more efficient way to manage resources in Azure. This feature helps you optimize storage costs in Azure environments, by allowing you to switch the storage type of a managed disk to a lower tier, like from Premium SSD to Standard HDD, when you shut down a virtual machine (VM) using the StorageTypeAtShutdown custom property. Once you turn the VM back on, the storage will go back to the original setting in StorageType or WBCDiskStorageType custom property.

More efficiency for Azure and Citrix

On top of this feature that reduces storage spending, we’ve added tons of capabilities to support IT efficiency and automation, including:

  • Shared Image Gallery that you can use to choose images from different shared subscriptions to create and update catalogs using PowerShell.
  • Modify MCS-provisioned machines to make additional changes to existing catalogs instead of having to create ones from scratch, including storage type, machine profile, license type, host group, and WBC catalogs.
  • Zone Redundant Storage-based disk (ZRS) support so if a zone goes down a ZRS disk can be attached to a VM in a different zone to recover from failures.
  • Accelerated Networking support that bypasses virtual switches for direct access to hardware to reduce latency, jitter, and CPU utilization.
  • Azure VM Extension support so you can add extensions to VMs in your catalog, view the list of supported extensions, and remove extensions from an ARM template machine profile.

Security Upgrades for Azure

We’ve added new features to improve security for Azure as well. First, support for Azure AD Dynamic Security Groups. Citrix now supports Azure AD-joined VM dynamic security groups for a machine catalog. You can set dynamic membership rules based on a catalog’s naming scheme to assign a dynamic security group to the VMs in the catalog.

We have also added trusted launch support for Azure Ephemeral OS disk so you can create provisioning schemes using ephemeral OS disks on Windows. Trusted launch protects your business against attacks by enabling technologies like secure boot and virtualized trusted platform module.

Our Citrix HDX Plus for Windows 365 offering includes security updates too, including integration with third-party identity solutions for a more secure authentication solution. We also included additional layers of security to applications and data through granular policy controls to protect corporate data from exfiltration. 

Citrix and AWS, for even better performance

Citrix DaaS Standard and Premium in the AWS Marketplace

We’ve made it easier to purchase licenses directly from the AWS marketplace for DaaS Standard and DaaS Premium to expand AWS deployments. Citrix DaaS Standard is an affordable and comprehensive DaaS solution that can quickly deliver virtual applications and desktops to employees through existing AWS subscriptions.

Citrix DaaS Premium is a full-service solution with fast provisioning, cloud management, and features specifically designed to deliver a superior hybrid work solution from one unified console. This offering also includes Adaptive Authentication and App Protection security tools for enhanced security. Offering Citrix DaaS via AWS streamlines migration, expands capabilities, and simplifies the ability to buy Citrix licenses. Once you make a purchase, you will be redirected to the Citrix cloud console to deploy the license.

More scale for AWS

We’ve also added the ability to increase your AWS scale to 1,500 VMs for organizations that need to scale environments up and out on demand. Lastly, we added AWS Throttling to improve scale and performance by reducing the number of start instances by batching them during power on action. 

The flexibility to do what you need, and the choice to do what you want

Our recent upgrades to deploying Citrix workloads on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS show how dedicated we are to ensuring Citrix offers a wide variety of vendors, integrations, and solutions for fully customizable solutions, delivered to any device. We can’t know every situation that your business will be in, but we do know that a flexible solution will help you adjust to those changes every time. And we’ll keep working to add more features for all vendors to make that possible.

For even more information on how Citrix delivers workload and device flexibility, check out the latest What’s New with Citrix blog. 

Read all four blogs in this series:

Disclaimer: The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and are subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.