8 Signs You Need to Migrate Users to the Cloud with Citrix on Azure, Part 2

Is moving your Citrix VDI workloads to Microsoft Azure the right next step for your business? In part 1 of this blog series, we zeroed-in on the first four key signs that it just might be. You may be seeing rising costs for your on-premise VDI estate and have determined that replacing or upgrading your existing end-user estate is too costly. You may also have multiple locations and have found that your overseas offices experience poor performance over VPN connections.

But what else may lead you to consider Microsoft Azure? Let’s look at the second set of indicators:

5. You think Azure hosting is too expensive – The good news is that your assumptions about the costs of Azure are probably wrong. In fact, by migrating your Citrix VDI estate to Azure, you can:

• Cut your overall desktop infrastructure costs by 55 percent
• Reduce IT labour and maintenance costs
• Scale on a pay-as-you-go basis, ensuring you only ever pay for what you use
• Completely eradicate CAPEX costs
• Reduce storage costs by up to 80 percent

When comparing the cost of an Azure-hosted VDI solution, to an on-premise estate, the benefits are as apparent as ever. With less amount of money being spent on storage, infrastructure and IT labour costs, your business is free to develop your Citrix on Azure efforts and focus on more pressing business investments.

6. You’re not ready for snow days or worse disasters – On the face of it, on-premise VDI looks like the perfect solution for disaster recovery. Whether it’s a case of letting your staff work from home on a snow day – when three centimetres of snow brings the entire British transport network to a grinding halt – or something more serious, VDI gives everyone secure access to the apps and data they need wherever they work.

However, there’s a limitation with on-premise VDI systems. The odds are that they aren’t scaled for this use case, only for the number of people who might be working remotely on a regular day. This is understandable, as provisioning for 4,000 remote users when you usually only have 400 would be insanely expensive on-premise.

The benefit of migrating your Citrix VDI estate onto Azure is that you can scale up on demand and provision as many virtual machines as you need, when you need them, on a pay-as-you-go basis. Southern Rail can do their worst and you’ll be fine.

7. You want to simplify Windows 10 migration  – Some companies are still hesitant to migrate to Windows 10 because of concerns about app compatibility, hardware compatibility and the potential cost of hardware upgrades.

Citrix AppDNA can help with automated app compatibility testing, while XenApp and XenDesktop (running on Azure) can deliver line-of-business applications to any device without interruption, whether running on Windows 10 or older operating systems. This makes the migration journey less disruptive and doesn’t demand expensive new hardware purchases.

8. You struggle to reconcile expectations for mobile with security and compliance demands – Citrix on Azure lets you deliver a single digital workplace for your staff with access to line of business applications and the full capabilities of Office 365. This includes secure access to data repositories, such as OneDrive and SharePoint, as well as communication tools like Skype for Business. Best of all, users can access these capabilities on any internet-connected device, including Mac, Android, Windows and Linux devices.

But, for an added security blanket, the data remains backed-up in the cloud and access is strictly controlled by Azure data centres, so a lost or stolen device isn’t a security nightmare.

As we’ve pointed out in this series, by moving your Citrix VDI estate to Azure, your business will free up IT resources, cut costs, and deliver unprecedented levels of flexibility without compromising security or the end user experience. So, if you’re already using Citrix VDI solutions like XenDesktop or XenApp, moving them to Azure is something to put on your agenda today.