I’ve been a long time proponent of moving to Citrix Cloud (otherwise known as Citrix DaaS). Why? Well if you already have Citrix Onprem you know that you have to maintain multiple Windows servers that house the Citrix roles:
- Delivery Controller
- StoreFront web server
- Director
- SQL database
You have to do monthly patching of these, Citrix software upgrades and keep up with which version of Citrix is supported on what operating systems. In addition, if you allow remote access you are also maintaining a Netscaler or F5 or maybe a VPN solution and all of the security concerns that come with that. With Citrix DaaS you don’t have to manage all of that infrastructure. Citrix does it for you.
What’s left for you to manage is a couple of Cloud Connector servers for each resource location where you have VDI or Published App workloads. A resource location can be your OnPrem environment, Azure or another cloud provider. So that’s another benefit of Citrix Cloud – the ability to move your workloads off prem. Optionally you might also need a Citrix FAS server if you are doing Azure Authentication.
Now if you are already using Citrix onprem and happy to keep managing the infrastructure there, some good news is that Citrix has changed their stance now that they’ve been acquired by Cloud Software Group. There was a heavy push previously to get everyone to Cloud and now they are embracing Hybrid. You can read about the Universal Subscription and features that they will be porting back to Onprem here: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2023/09/25/whats-new-and-next-with-citrix-webinar-qa/
As far as cost goes, with the new licensing model there is one thing that I am not happy with. You can only purchase Citrix Universal subscription licenses in quantities of 250 (user/device) or 100 (concurrent) licenses and up. https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2023/03/02/introducing-citrix-universal-licensing/ So if you are a smaller organization of say 50 users, you can’t get into Citrix Cloud unless you go through a CSP. There’s not a lot of info out there that tells you what you get with CSP licensing, but since I ran into this scenario with one of my customers I found that the CSP basically manages your Citrix Cloud environment for you. I called around to see if I could get more info from CSPs listed in my area and didn’t get a call back from one and the other told me they didn’t know why they were on the list as they didn’t provide that service. So, unfortunately for my smaller customers that don’t want an onprem instance, I can no longer recommend Citrix 😢 I’m hoping Citrix changes this in the future but for now I’ll keep recommending it to my larger customers or those who are good with managing the infrastructure onprem.