How to successfully migrate to the cloud - Part 2

You’re migrating to Citrix on Azure for scalability, cost and flexibility. In this article we look at ways to make your transition smooth. Click here to read part 1 of the series. You have made your decision to make the switch to Citrix on Azure. It’s time to find out how it actually works.

It’s important to realise that your Citrix backend infrastructure is still all managed and owned by Citrix, which means your upgrades, patching and security is managed for you. The result is that your workspaces are always up to date without needing to allocate expensive resources to patch and manage security updates; that’s handled by Citrix on your behalf.

Your users connect to their workplaces and services via the Microsoft Azure front end, making it a seamless and unified user experience.

Because it’s an “as-a-service” consumption model, you’ll be able to manage and predict your expenditure while easily scaling and provisioning new services quickly and easily.

You will also find migrating your users to Windows 10 easier by using XenDesktop Essentials, giving you a cost-effective way to take advantage of the operating system’s end-user experience and security enhancements. Because it’s available at $12 per user per month, and includes all the XenDesktop management components (Citrix Studio, Director, Delivery Controller, and SQL Server) and the underlying Microsoft Operating System and Azure infrastructure for those components, the migration is cheaper than deploying Windows 10 on-premise.

MAKING THE MOVE - PARTNER FOR SUCCESS

If you have made the decision to transition to Citrix on Azure for scalability, cost and flexibility, here is a high level overview on how to simplify and manage your transition.

There are four basic steps to make the transition easy:

  1. Plan;
  2. Test and assess;
  3. Transition; and
  4. Optimise.

Starting with a plan is the most important step in your transition strategy.  You will need to determine whether your organisation is cloud-ready (and where the gaps are). Who are your key stakeholders and what do they need to know, or consult with you on their needs? This is the point where you should decide whether you will take a pure cloud or hybrid approach – this is largely determined by whether you have greater need for regulatory compliance or data concerns around specific applications.

Once you have done all your planning and made the decisions, it is important to create a proof of concept within a sandbox environment (or more than one) to test critical applications and services. This lets you determine whether your apps are ready for the cloud or should remain on-premise.

Once you’ve worked out where your workloads and data will sit, you can now start transitioning some of your apps and data to Microsoft Azure. You will need to establish a connection between your on-premise IT infrastructure and the new cloud environment by setting up either an ExpressRoute or a Site-to-Site VPN, connecting your Active Directory and installing Citrix Cloud connectors.

You can use tools such as NetScaler Gateway Service to optimise and secure the connection while the transition is in train. This is also the time to collect all your user resources (on-premises and cloud), design your master application server and desktop images and build in application layering to simplify administration.

Once the transition is complete you can optimise your new environment by using Smart Check to validate the health and performance of your service and workloads. During this phase you can also educate your end users and staff by training them on the new environment. Your administrator staff should also be reviewing and using the range of Citrix monitoring tools in Microsoft Azure to track usage of IT services.

Read part one here.

Read more about our partnership with Citrix:

Thomas Duryea Logicalis receives ANZ top competitive award from Citrix
Our Partners - Citrix
Citrix taps Thomas Duryea Logicalis as APAC's first certified delivery partner

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Tags Digital Transformation, cloud migration, The Cloud

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