A few months ago, I chatted with the CIO of a tech company (which will remain nameless), who spoke about his simple vision on adopting new applications: SaaS and Cloud first.

In fact, his whole strategy on cloud was this simple: SaaS before PaaS before IaaS. Truth to be told, it’s a great strategy! But his major concerns were security and that he had to take a lot of “legacy” systems into account. That’s not very different than most of the organizations today; for them a hybrid model is — and has been for many years — the way forward.

Take a look at these photos:

These are pictures from a festival called Tomorrowland, held each year in Belgium. Starting quite small in 2005, it’s grown into one of the best and biggest music festivals in the world. As you can see in the photos, each taken in a subsequent year, the main stage gets more elaborate and more spectacular each time. But this increasing spectacle also brings a lot of complexity for the organization, as they have to contend with somewhere close to 200,000 visitors in just one weekend.

It’s not much of a leap to compare Tomorrowland’s scale to the proliferation of applications and the increasing complexity inside organizations. Think about how things worked back in the “old days”: you started your workday by turning on your computer, waited a few minutes for it to boot up (you could make yourself a cup of coffee while this was happening), and you went along until it was time to go home again. You could only do work while you were at work.

But those days were short-lived. We soon saw the rise of web-based apps, and, eventually, SaaS apps. Nowadays, everybody wants to move their apps and data to the cloud (if possible), so they and their people can work from anywhere, at anytime, on any device. This new way of working isn’t just convenient for end-users, either, it helps them be more productive and more efficient, so, in turn, you can be more productive and efficient.

As we approach the End of Life for XenApp 6.5 — (30/6/2018) or (14/1/2020) — for customers with an extended support contract, we are also approaching a compelling event. Customers on XenApp 6.5 will have to face another migration. Let’s think about that for a second, and what that would mean for your team:

Imagine, planning another migration:

Hundreds of hours of planning & preparation.

Introduction of new architectures.

Mastering a new technology requires a specific skill set.

Mixing on-prem applications with cloud-based apps.

As they say, “been there, done that,” (and many times)! Such a migration would create a huge burden for IT teams, and it’d be completely unnecessary, as the most important thing for the business is providing users with the applications and data they need to do a great job. Focus on what’s most important. This is exactly why you should take a look at our cloud offering.

Throughout this series of blog posts, I will talk about moving to Citrix Cloud platform and their services. We will start off with the XenApp and XenDesktop Service. Stay tuned!