This blog post was co-authored by Wayne Liu, Senior Manager, Product Management, at Citrix.

In all digital transformations, compliance and security are key factors that organizations prioritize to drive decisions. When making the move to the cloud, it’s imperative to know you will have the right security tools in place, no matter where your resources are managed from. Citrix Session Recording provides both screen recording and event capturing capabilities to help maintain security and compliance. And today, we are bringing that power natively into the Citrix Cloud platform.

We are pleased to share that Session Recording is now available as a preview in Citrix DaaS (previously Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service)!

Session Recording has been used by our on-premises Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium customers for years. Our cloud service customers also could leverage this capability in a hybrid scenario. Now, Session Recording is available in every Citrix DaaS edition and is more easily deployable than ever.

Customers have had to build standalone infrastructure — Session Recording server farms — alongside their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops infrastructure to process the recording files from VDAs to storage locations.  They often have had multiple sites and infrastructure setups. Additionally, organizations have had the option to put all of the necessary Session Recording components in the cloud and store files within Azure or AWS RDS databases, but the process to configure was very hands-on.

The new Session Recording service makes management, monitoring, and playback much simpler since it was built in the cloud. We have incorporated the Session Recording console into the Citrix Cloud management plane so that Citrix DaaS customers can easily manage their recorded sessions alongside the rest of their resources. As a result, combining the configuration and playback in web-based consoles will save admins an immense amount of time and effort.

Let’s take a closer look at the service:

Session Recording service landing page (click image to view larger)

The integrated management interface makes it easy for customers to manage the environment, and onboarding to Session Recording service is a straightforward, three-step process setup:

  1. Download the cloud client installer from the service.
  2. Install the cloud client to the existing Session Recording servers.
  3. Check the server status in the service, and you’re done with the onboarding process!
Session Recording server settings node (click image to view larger)

Unlike the traditional Session Recording on-prem solution, which provides several separate consoles for video playback and policy configuration, this service uses one interface for all operations.

Session Recording policy node (click image to view larger)

Customer admins can configure a recording policy and view the recording files directly from the service console.

Session Recording recordings node (click image to view larger)

Let’s take a closer look at the service and how it works with Citrix DaaS (click the image to view larger):

Session Recording service architecture (click the image to view larger)

Session Recording service has its own data flow and does not depend on a Citrix Cloud Connector for service communication. The lightweight Cloud client handles the outbound connection to the service. That means the existing Cloud Connector planning for your Citrix DaaS environment will continue work. Organizations can still control the outbound Session Recording traffic by using enterprise proxy servers, and, for security reasons, we recommend limiting its connection to only the URLs listed in the product documentation.

Using the service doesn’t mean your recording data will be moved to cloud. Session Recording service does not move any of the recording or event data into the cloud. The captured event and screen streams remain at the resource location, and the Session Recording service provides an encrypted channel for your admin to secure access those data from the cloud.

Session Recording service is now available in preview in the U.S., and we are planning to enable the service for other regions. Customers can still set up and maintain the infrastructure to use Session Recording for both cloud and on-prem use cases at their own pace.

So, what are you waiting for? Log in and get started today, and learn more about Session Recording in our product documentation.