This blog was co-authored by Dave Brear, Senior Principal Solution Architect at Citrix.

2023 was a challenging year for many businesses. Geopolitical instability and financial uncertainty have had broad reaching implications. Hybrid work continues to be in a state of flux, with some businesses back in office full time and some on partial hybrid schedules. Businesses also remain acutely aware of the increased risk of cyber crime. Ransomware and other attacks continue to grow and IT budgets must compete with the needs for additional security solutions.

Across the globe, these factors have impacted Citrix customers in a variety of ways. In this blog, we’ll go over the top five challenges we heard repeated throughout 2023 including security, employee experience, rising costs, IT automation, and operational efficiency and the Citrix capabilities you should implement to help your business continue to tackle these challenges, and new ones, in 2024.

Security

The top concern across industries is security, and for good reason. Per Gartner, the top cybersecurity trend in 2022 was attack surface expansion, partially as a result of hybrid work settings. Hybrid work and hybrid infrastructure have added complexity for IT as users need access to corporate resources outside of the office. Corporate-managed device programs have become more expensive, and 85% of companies only provide select employees or no employees with devices, meaning employees must bring their own devices. Implementing a bring your own device (BYOD) policy may be more cost effective, but it can lead to security concerns and compromised credentials. 

Citrix has tons of features to help make your business more secure. We’ve been providing our customers with tools to implement Zero Trust access to applications for quite some time, and we continue to make enhancements to our security capabilities. Learn more about all the security features that Citrix has launched this year:

Employee experience

Retaining top talent is a top concern so providing a high quality employee experience needs to be a top priority. If your employees work in a hybrid environment, or if you have employees in different offices around the globe, you need technology that can deliver applications and desktops anywhere, so your employees stay productive no matter where they’re located. Providing a holistic experience to your employees starts with a positive digital experience for all employees, including full time, third-party, contract, and acquired employees. Positive employee experiences can make a huge difference, especially considering that 50 million workers in the US quit their jobs in 2022.

You can make your employees more productive with Citrix because not only can you deliver crisp audio and video, but you can quickly give new employees and contractors secure access to corporate applications. This includes features that help improve the employee experience like those listed below:

Rising costs

Spending was top of mind for CIOs. In fact, according to a survey conducted by EY, 35 percent of businesses indicated that cloud and infrastructure costs hindered their digital transformation efforts. Spending concerns have IT looking for different ways to control spending, including using hybrid cloud models to avoid vendor lock-in, making the most of existing investments in on-premises infrastructure, and implementing automated controls. 

Citrix supports hybrid cloud, multi cloud, and on-premises resources so you can build a cost-effective environment using your existing resources. With support for every major public cloud provider, you can pick and choose the best options for features, price, and more without worrying about whether you’ll be able to integrate that provider into your existing infrastructure. Your Citrix comes with more features to optimize costs too, including the following:

IT automation

Many businesses continue to prioritize digital transformation and modernization projects. However, IT departments must support everyday operational tasks while trying to deploy new projects. Finding talent for IT has only gotten harder too, with 41% of CIOs reporting slow hiring for IT roles, 35% reporting a decreased overall IT budget and 29% reporting an IT hiring freeze, per a study by Gartner. As businesses search for ways to make staff more productive, automation is underutilized in IT, according to research by Gartner only 9 percent of IT work is automated or AI augmented. This means that a majority of IT departments still rely on manual work methods, tying up employees in manual workflows rather than working on value-added projects. 

Citrix includes automation features built into some offerings, including Citrix Autoscale and Machine Creation Services, where you can set up load-based scaling to automatically adjust the number of virtual machines available based on demand. In addition, Citrix offers three more features to help you increase IT automation:

Operational efficiency

As environments get more complex, it becomes harder for IT teams to keep operations running smoothly and to monitor those environments, especially with the rise in augmented workforces and generative AI. Without oversight into the health of your operations, your business risks unexpected downtime due to operational issues. Streamlining and simplifying operations will help IT increase efficiency across hybrid, cloud, and on-premises deployments. 

Citrix offers tools like Citrix Director for agentless monitoring and Analytics for Performance for improved user experience through monitoring and troubleshooting. There are more features for operational efficiency too, including those listed below:

Optimize your Citrix investment in 2024

2023 came with its own unique set of challenges, where organizations had to balance the desire for greater innovation against limited resources in addition to responding to a host of external challenges. Citrix continues to invest in innovative new features that you can adopt today to help you improve security, enhance the employee experience, control cloud spending, increase automation, and improve operational efficiency this year. For more details about these features, check Citrix Product Documentation, or contact your Citrix representative.