This is a guest blog post by Richard Sah, CTO, NComputing.

Colleges and universities are accelerating their digital transformations with new learning, teaching, and business models that improve school offerings.

But this transformation comes with some fundamental challenges:

  • Reducing IT complexity across student learning, faculty teaching, and collaborative work environments
  • Improving capabilities, performance, and efficiency while reducing costs
  • Enhance data security and privacy
  • Maintaining budget constraints and limited support resources

To address these challenges, a collaboration between NComputing and Citrix focused on an innovative endpoint solution, the Citrix Ready workspace hub (RX-HDX).

Launched last year, the RX-HDX has shown itself to be a disruptive endpoint device in the virtualization market. The RX-HDX slashes price points for VDI client hardware and support by up to 80 percent while delivering all the performance, security, and manageability required in business and educational settings.

Powered by the versatile Raspberry Pi platform, the RX-HDX packs a serious punch with a footprint smaller than most smartphones. Fully optimized for Citrix, this Citrix Ready standard device supports HDX 3D Pro and RTME while using less than five watts of power.

Citrix Casting, technology specific to the Citrix Ready workspace hub, enables a user to move their virtual session from smartphone, tablet, or laptop to a nearby RX-HDX device for any number of innovative use cases such as sharing content to a large monitor or projector.

Powering Educational Excellence: A Case Study from the University of Law

Many schools and universities have addressed computing challenges with help from the Citrix Ready workspace hub revolution, including the University of Law in the United Kingdom.

The University of Law, also known as ULaw, is one of the UK’s oldest specialty providers of legal education and has a rich heritage and reputation for innovation. With a history that dates as far back as 1876, ULaw has campuses in eight cities across the UK: Birmingham, Bristol, Chester, Guildford, Leeds, London, Manchester, and Nottingham.

With around 700 staff and 8,000 students spread across a multitude of locations, the university has adopted several key initiatives to ensure that all users receive a rich, high-performance workspace regardless of geography or user type.

The Requirements

Significant investment was required to renew the university’s diverse range of endpoints, which consisted of a large number of aging PCs. Simplifying support processes and streamlining the management of IT security were crucial considerations. Responding to feedback from students, ULaw sought the help of Cetus Solutions and NComputing to design a cost-efficient, intelligent, and modern solution that would allow them to meet these objectives.

The Solution

Using NComputing and Stratodesk solutions, Cetus Solutions worked with ULaw to refresh the PC hardware estate with NComputing’s Citrix Ready workspace hub, powered by Raspberry Pi. The Citrix Ready workspace hub is small, stateless, and inexpensive and has an array of unique features that made it a versatile and appealing proposition for ULaw.

The university was able to reduce its carbon footprint significantly while keeping capital expenditure very low. When factoring in the security advantages of using a stateless endpoint device and the administrative advantages of centralizing management, the costs, and benefits realized by the Citrix Ready workspace hub were immediately apparent.

Cetus worked with ULaw to optimize the delivery of desktops and applications to students securely and remotely. These applications included Microsoft’s suite of technologies (Office 365 and Dynamics 365), as well as a variety of third-party applications for staff including Blackboard and student management systems.

By identifying the right use cases, the university was able to harness the power and versatility of the management console to deliver specific requirements to different user types.

The Benefits

The project has garnered a lot of positive attention with students now able to access their workspaces quickly and securely and from any location. The simplification of the remote support model has helped IT staff to focus on being proactive and freed up resources for other initiatives.

As the university continually strives to improve academically, the Citrix Ready workspace hub has helped by removing obstacles for the swift implementation of projects. With its expandability as an IoT platform, the Citrix Ready workspace hub is a ready-made solution, paving the way for future investments by ULaw in the future of work.

“By deploying Citrix Ready workspace hub, we have been able to reduce our carbon footprint whilst ensuring that our internal resources are efficiently allocated. It gives us room to grow our investment and continue to improve workspace delivery in a measured fashion,” said Tom Brady, Chief Information Officer at the University of Law.

NComputing is exhibiting at EDUCAUSE 2019 October 15-17 in the Citrix Ready Partner Pavilion (booth #1817). See how the Citrix Ready workspace hub by NComputing can help educational institutions accelerate their digital transformation. Learn more about the Citrix Ready workspace hub by NComputing.