This is a guest blog post by Kevin Jackson, of GC GlobalNet. The post was originally published here.

Global business can no longer delay information technology digitalization and modernization. Projects languishing on the shelf for years waiting for the right time or need were suddenly critical when the pandemic made business 100 percent virtual. This sudden operational sea change carried the simultaneous challenge of making corporate decisions when physical collaboration and intimate negotiations were no longer possible. This reality was just one of the many critical business challenges John Furrier, and I discussed during my recent Citrix Launchpad: Cloud interview below.

One of the most challenging, previously unimaginable, was making decisions in the virtual world when the principals couldn’t physically meet. While not a formal diagnosis, Zoom Fatigue is genuine. Krystal Jagoo, a mental health professional with over 10 years of experience, noted that this ailment feels “similar to what we tend to think of as exhaustion or burnout.” Much of this feeling comes down to the “increased cognitive demands of video conferencing communication,” Jagoo adds.

During Citrix Launchpad: Cloud, Citrix demonstrated that they have targeted this and other vital issues associated with deploying software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in this new virtual business world. Specifically:

  • Addressing the difficulty in determining where to host SaaS applications;
  • Dealing with unpredictable application response to end-users, both employees and customers; and
  • Meeting SLA requirements for application response as traffic patterns and user geography change.

By delivering innovation to the commodity services of leading cloud providers, Citrix brings the critical added value that helps organizations manage, simplify, and accelerate their hybrid multi-cloud journeys.

Application Deployment Innovations

Executives working to remove complexity and increase information technology flexibility and control can now look to Citrix as they shift to hybrid-infrastructure environments. The innovations the company announced support moving applications to the cloud while simultaneously consolidating access and application delivery. These new capabilities also deliver enhanced security, with an intent to reduce costs.

As a package, Citrix App Delivery and Security Service support the fundamental reexamination of how applications are delivered and secured. This offering enhances employee experience, reinforces customer-perceived differentiation, and builds intimacy and engagement with both. By accelerating the organizational transition to cloud and SaaS, it can harvest increases in application demand elasticity, global reach, and uniform access. A powerful component of this solution is Citrix’s Intelligent Traffic Management (ITM) technology which delivers visibility into the state of the Internet by collecting up to 10 billion data points per day from 1 billion users across 50,000 networks worldwide.

Citrix App Delivery and Security Service uses the information it learns from the existing and proven ITM capabilities to continuously optimize application delivery when things change. These insights contribute to:

  • Self-healing when things go wrong;
  • A single dashboard to define high-level multivector protection, confirm security policies, and apply a consistent feature set across all application environments;
  • Web application firewall, bot management, and API protections.

Virtual Desktop Enhancements

Citrix DaaS Innovations include Citrix Provisioning Service (PVS), Image Portability Service, and automated Virtual Delivery Agents (VDA).

PVS is a software streaming technology that enables desktops and apps to be provisioned and re-provisioned in real-time from a single shared golden image. Image Portability Service for Azure and Google Cloud streamlines image management across hybrid-cloud deployments. Administrators only need to create a desktop image one time — for your on-premises environment, for example — and the service will automatically transform that image for Azure or Google Cloud. This service is excellent for implementing company-wide disaster recovery strategies or provisioning images for new employees. The Citrix and Azure solution can deliver up to 153 percent ROI.

To further drive operational improvements, Citrix has announced a new service to automate VDA updates. Today, administrators use custom scripts to facilitate the installation of virtual delivery agents to persistent machines. This new service removes the complexity and time investment required to keep Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service up to date.

An additional upgrade is the integration of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops services with ServiceNow Virtual Agent. This improvement gives end users self-service abilities to resolve common session reset issues without manually logging incidents or creating time-consuming service tickets.

Citrix and Nutanix have also teamed to accelerated transitions to hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI). Citrix Cloud is the management plane for virtual applications, desktops services, gateway services, analytics, and other crucial management services. With this design, these services are all delivered on-demand across all geographies. Nutanix provides the underlying hosting and orchestration fabrics for all related workloads. This combination creates an HCI that gives clients the flexibility to shift workloads among public and private clouds. The approach delivers simplicity, cost advantages, a unified management plane, and enables workload portability across clouds.

Hybrid Cloud Value

The Citrix Cloud provides a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that effectively eliminates the challenge of determining where to host SaaS applications. Intelligent Traffic Management (ITM) technology ensures predictable application responses to both employees and customers. Citrix DaaS innovations deliver user support services that guarantee all SLA requirements for application response are met as traffic patterns and user geography change. The combination does more than enhance commodity cloud services. It introduces a new paradigm for application deployment, management, and security across the modern hybrid cloud environment. To learn more about these and other Citrix innovations, please visit Citrix Launchpad: Cloud recap.