Dominic Green
Cloud Computing Practice Lead
5 April 2017
Citrix Xen Desktop Essentials on Azure
Microsoft and Citrix have recently announced new services to deploy Windows 10 desktops and application virtualisation from the Azure cloud platform.
As a partner to both organisations, we feel that this new offering creates opportunities for organisations to enhance existing Citrix services, enabling on-demand scalability and simple upgrades to the latest hardware as Azure evolves.
In addition to leveraging existing investments, it also can be used as a business enabler for organisations to develop a faster migration to Windows 10. This can be achieved by allowing existing apps to be virtualised and deployed independently of the desktop. Meaning existing applications not yet tested on Windows 10 can be deployed in their own virtualisation layer, removing the need to remediate these for Windows 10. The building blocks for this can be deployed quickly and simply from the Azure marketplace.
Other benefits include the ability to deploy desktops and applications to new geographies creating business agility without the need to invest in new hardware and network services. These services can be deployed to users across internet links around the globe almost any IOS, Android, Linux and Windows device.
The new service supports high end graphic deployments by utilising the latest Nvidia grid cards on Azure. With Microsoft and Citrix delivering best in class solutions to millions of customers over a 25 year period, this appears to be an attractive proposition to further enhance cloud solutions and enable business agility.
