How to successfully migrate to the cloud - Part 1

Whether you are upgrading your on-premise Citrix apps at their end of life, or looking to increase your computing capacity without spending capital, switching to Citrix on Azure makes a lot of business sense. Business growth can be a nightmare for infrastructure and IT managers. The pressure of managing multiple apps, systems, cloud services and retiring products, along with restricted or diminishing budgets, means figuring out a better way to scale without spending up big.

Add to that, if you’re using older versions of Citrix technology such as XenDesktop and XenApp, they’re rapidly approaching end of life. While cloud is often touted as the simple solution - it’s never simple. So why is Citrix on Azure the best solution to ensure you’re not putting more load onto your infrastructure when the business asks you to look for cost effective ways to cater for growth?

PUTTING THE CLOUD INTO CONTEXT

There are significant benefits of moving your on-premise environment to Citrix on Azure. Let’s look into the top three benefits - reducing costs, managing your environment is easier and giving you better control over your workloads.

Reducing costs will likely be the biggest appeal (at least to your CFO!). There are three ways Citrix on Azure lets you save costs. By migrating from on-premise to a cloud environment you automatically benefit by moving from a capex to a monthly opex pricing model. Secondly, you reduce your administrative requirements by offloading mundane tasks such as maintenance and patching of back-end systems. By refocusing your staff resources from operational headaches, you allow them to focus on more strategic business outcomes, making real world business outcomes happen.

The environment is also built to scale easily, by enabling a Smart Scale option. This allows you to define the schedule to proactively scale up or down according to your users’ demands. In this way, Citrix on Azure not only gives you cost savings but also flexibility, elasticity and performance at up to 50% reduction over on-premise.

Secondly, Citrix on Azure gives you more control over management of your infrastructure. With a single, unified console and user login, your users get the benefit of a consistent experience across the organisation. It’s also easier for service integration - simply load up or switch on the apps that you need within the environment. Updating apps is also made easier, as it’s an evergreen environment, meaning you’ll always be running on the latest version - with no costly upgrade pathways.

The third benefit is being able to provision workloads where you want. You can quickly provision new sites and offices or rapidly set up test environments. Only Citrix on Azure provides complete, on-demand Workspaces as a Service (WaaS) – securely integrating access to apps, data, and more.

THINK HYBRID

What if you wanted to maintain an on-premise environment? Hybrid cloud gives you the best of both worlds, by providing an on-premises hosted infrastructure model coupled with integration in public cloud.

This allows you to gain the cost efficiencies of going with a public cloud, while maintaining the security and control over select apps and data (especially if you operate within a highly regulated industry) within your on-premise environment.

More importantly, hybrid cloud gives you flexibility to adapt your infrastructure to changing business circumstances - something that is vital in a fast-moving, highly competitive world where lightening fast responses to changing environments can mean the difference between success and failure.

Furthermore, going with a hybrid approach lets you use your existing infrastructure more efficiently by bursting into the public cloud during peaks in demand. This way, you only need to pay for what you use.  

If you go with Citrix on Azure, you also get the benefits of accessing the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit Program, which can save you up to 40% on your licence fees each year. This is possible only if you are on an Enterprise Agreement. If you have your own Windows Server Licenses and Software Assurance, then you can access the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure-As-a-Service (IaaS) using these licences via your Enterprise Agreement.

Taking a hybrid approach with Citrix on Azure will give you the following benefits:

  • It’s everything you know about Citrix, just deployed in different locations - so getting up to speed should be simple;
  • You have access to availability sets, Smart Scale tools, backup services and more;
  • You can scale up and down - giving you the flexibility you need to grow the business when you need to;
  • Firing up new compute resources is relatively fast;
  • Scaling compute resources is almost limitless;
  • There is no limit to how many providers you can access for resources;
  • When architected properly, the cloud providers are conceptually nothing but another data centre at your disposal.

By using the common cloud-based management plane across all your Citrix environments, you can manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This means ensuring high availability, establishing multiple locations for disaster recovery, and managing multiple data centres and clouds.

Part 2 examines the tools and approaches you need to make your transition successful. Click here to read part 2 now.

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Tags Digital Transformation, cloud migration, The Cloud

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