This is a guest blog post by Daniel Thurston, Sales Director, Automate101 Limited.

Have you had this experience? You receive a call from a VP, who says, “I have new employees sitting here unproductive because your team hasn’t got them set up with a login to anything!”

Frustrated, you investigate. You find that the process wasn’t followed, forms haven’t been filled in, and nobody was notified. A support request was received this morning.

According to ESG, management complexity is one of the top concerns of 40 percent of organizations, and 25 percent say too much time is spent fielding help desk requests. You can see the source of frustration across businesses and their IT departments.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix Cloud deliver an excellent control plane and a best-in-class delivery experience. This has enabled teams responding to the COVID-19 pandemic to scale quickly and to deliver a secure work-from-home experience to a large user base.

With a rapidly changing workforces, along with the challenge of support staff working from home, help desks have become overloaded with user creates, deletes, access requests, and password resets and more password resets! Extended and fluid working hours means pressure on support.

Growing the help desk team or outsourcing brings real risks and challenges:

  1. Too many admins making too many changes, making delivery fragile and introducing security risks.
  2. Robust processes for user administration makes response times slow and tarnishes your reputation.
  3. User frustration means you can expect shadow IT to emerge, expanding security gaps.
  4. Increasingly expensive and hard-to-find technical skills are needed to support IT services.

You can forget your value proposition and delivery outcomes of your VDI or DaaS deployment if you can’t provide high-quality support. Fortunately, you can learn from IT service providers who succeed by delivering a responsive DaaS service at a fixed price per user per month:

  • User self-service gives end users the freedom they need by putting them in control of their service. Get rid of paperwork and remove finger pointing.
  • Focus on automation, not administration. Focus on automating the common tasks that make up 80 percent of the work so the service desk can handle more without escalation and give more time to other 20 percent of tasks.
  • Stay secure by removing admin rights for your help desk. If you automate the right things, there should be less need for admin rights.
  • Make DaaS provisioning part of the HR onboarding process, eliminating last-minute emergency calls.
  • Embed approval workflows, so that cost centers know what they’re paying for and decisions are auditable.

Atria is used by Citrix Service Providers globally and has improved the scalability and performance of government departments, specialist ISVs, desktops-as-a-service providers, and systems integrators.

With Atria and Citrix Cloud, you can put decisions and power where they belong, freeing the business to create, provision, and manage users themselves, simply and instantly — including password resets!

  • Citrix Cloud
  • Office 365
  • AD Groups
  • Azure AD
  • Virtual Apps and Desktops
  • And more!

At the same time, your environment is under control, with automated provisioning of Active Directory, Office 365, and VDI/DaaS, done consistently and the way your policy and procedure dictates.

Your help desk can focus on resolving issues and improving the experience, rather than just completing admin tasks. And you can deploy on any cloud, taking advantage of scale, pricing, and features that best suit you.

The end result? Your users are happy and productive, your management peers aren’t complaining, and your team is working on the next big thing!

Learn more about Atria’s integration with Citrix.