Welcome to the seventh and final installment of our Seven Ways to Simplify Your Digital Workspace Deployment blog series. In this blog, we are going to look at how to simplify business continuity and hybrid cloud.
The challenges of maintaining a modern workforce are ever changing and can be daunting. Desktops and user data must be available across multiple geographies to enable your business to continue if and when disaster strikes. A subset of end-users access their desktops and specialized apps infrequently. Hosting these solutions in a traditional on-prem datacenter isn’t economically feasible. As we have seen in recent months, end-users may be required to work from home or a remote location. Traditional on-prem solutions cannot scale within hours for rapid changes in workforce mobility and increase the demand for access. Many companies have come to realize the value of leveraging cloud providers to augment their on-prem environment. However, maintaining separate infrastructures is more complex and requires specialized replication.
Citrix® Virtual Apps and Desktops service provides users with the tools they need to work from anywhere. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service allows admins to keep their images on-premises and have Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) in the cloud. This allows them to be prepared when there is a failure with their on-prem VDAs or when there is increased demand causing their VDAs to be overloaded. Migrating to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service lets IT focus on business needs and end-users take advantage of the latest features and functionality. Citrix Cloud services help you transition to cloud at your own pace. With a hybrid, multicloud approach, you have the flexibility to choose the appropriate data center or cloud to host each application.
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service is cloud and hypervisor agnostic. You avoid lock-in and give your organization true resource flexibility. Citrix Cloud services give your business the agility needed to respond to a disaster recovery or business continuity event without having to deploy new infrastructure. By utilizing Autoscale, administrators can prioritize on-prem resources first and only burst to the cloud when the on-prem capacity is utilized. Admins have the option of deploying within their own public cloud tenants or within Citrix’s Azure tenant--in a fully managed DaaS solution. More information on how to use Citrix services within your Business Continuity strategy can be found in this Reference Architecture.
Other considerations when moving to the cloud are the uptime and fault tolerance of the cloud-based solution. Citrix Cloud services are built with high availability in mind. Citrix Cloud has an SLA of at least 99.9% monthly uptime. Citrix Cloud services utilize Azure® availability zones to ensure that the broker and the associated databases are resilient to cloud outages. Specifically, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service has different features to make it resilient and fault-tolerant. The Rendezvous protocol allows HDX sessions to bypass Citrix Cloud Connectors and connect directly to Citrix Gateway service. With service continuity, users are able to launch their virtual apps and desktops regardless of the cloud services’ health status. Service continuity allows users to connect to their virtual apps and desktops during outages, as long as the user device maintains a network connection to a resource location. Users can connect to virtual apps and desktops during outages in Citrix Cloud components or in public and private clouds. Users can connect directly to the resource location or through the Citrix Gateway service. A deep dive on how Citrix Cloud services are architected and built for resiliency can be found here.
Combining the solution from Citrix along with the simplicity and resilience of the Nutanix Cloud Platform allows your organization to provide end-to-end availability, helping ensure continuous business operations. Leveraging various cloud providers for business continuity may be as simple as swiping a credit card, however, it is fraught with risk and operational inefficiencies. Each cloud provider is unique in their management plane, networking stack, and security management. Nutanix Clusters addresses these issues by bringing automated installation and a single management interface to public cloud bare metal offerings, such as from AWS and Azure. Along with the management interface, Nutanix Clusters™ allows you to scale out as demands increase with zero downtime.
Leveraging the single management interface to enable, manage, and monitor the replication of user data and applications removes the need for specialized tools, thereby reducing costs and operational complexity. Replication can be enabled in a point-to-point or a multipoint configuration, across the same cloud provider or disparate providers, including your on-prem solution. Depending on the latency between sites and business requirements, Nutanix can offer an RTO as low as a minute.
Thank you for reading through the Seven Ways to Simplify Your Digital Workspace Deployment blog series. We hope to have piqued your interest in the value of a Citrix and Nutanix partnership for your EUC environment.
For more information on the Nutanix + Citrix solution visit: https://www.nutanix.com/solutions/vdi/citrix
Check out the whole series by reading the intro blog.
Read the previous installment, How to Simplify Unified Workspace
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