Business continuity means more than dealing with flood or fire. Organizations in every industry have had to stay effective and agile while empowering their people to work from anywhere with access to all the information and applications they used in the office.

Cloud computing has proved to be valuable, but many businesses need a hybrid infrastructure that retains some applications or data at in-house data centers, while moving others to the cloud. Others choose a multi-cloud strategy and need to give staff seamless access to apps and information, wherever they are.

Many customers have found Citrix to be a perfect partner to support their cloud strategy. It enables them to combine cloud and on-premises resources into a secure and scalable desktop as a service (DaaS) for any device, anywhere.

As a result, as one customer told us, “People can simply get on with their job.”

Here’s how four customers use Citrix to support their cloud strategy.

Prime Healthcare Simplifies IT Management

The “Fastest Growing Hospital System in the US,” Prime Healthcare used Citrix to transform its systems for employees and IT.

For users, it delivered a consistent, easy-to-navigate experience. As Prime’s lead enterprise systems engineer and Citrix expert Srinivasan Shanmugam explains, “Consolidating disparate point solutions, upgrading operating systems, standardizing on one electronic medical record (EMR), and moving to Citrix Cloud have been a few of our most critical projects. … [Now] when users log in, they see both Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on-premises, and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops [cloud] service resources in a single window.”

Deploying Citrix Cloud services has also enabled Shanmugan and his team to simplify and streamline IT management.

“Ultimately,” he says, “the IT team offloaded infrastructure components to the cloud.”

Currently, the healthcare provider retains its data and workloads in on-premises datacenters but uses Citrix Cloud to manage its environment.

“With the Citrix Cloud hybrid model, Prime Healthcare gets the simplicity, scalability, and ease of management of cloud services, while at the same time being able to continue to run desktops and applications in on-premises datacenters.”

As a result, Prime benefits from a modern, robust and resilient IT platform while also freeing its IT specialists to focus on delivering value for its clinicians.

“Implementing Citrix Cloud technology and engaging Citrix to manage our digital solutions has truly empowered our IT team,” he says. “Now we have the time to devise creative new answers to the challenges we face. We’re essential to the growth of the business, and we’re also critical in the push to enable our doctors to be more focused on delivering better patient care.”

Read Prime Healthcare’s full story, including how it enabled secure remote access for clinicians during the pandemic.

Autodesk Delivers a Secure Desktop Wherever Employees Are Working

Autodesk helps employees, partners, and customers imagine, design, and make a better world. This requires providing secure and seamless access wherever people are working.

From shipping product DVDs to customers, the business has transitioned to providing full cloud access to its products. CIO Prakash Kota and his team have achieved this using Citrix solutions and public cloud, as he describes:

“We are truly stitching together the public cloud infrastructure and Citrix Cloud as the management plane so we can spin up virtual desktop and app instances wherever employees are working,”

Security is essential, but it must be friction-free to ensure great employee experience and customer experience.

With Citrix, Kota’s IT team can dynamically apply security policies for the virtual desktop infrastructure that detect anomalies in user behavior. These anomalies might signal internal threats. Also, because data lives in the data center rather than on the actual devices, sensitive information is always protected — even if a device is lost or stolen.

The Citrix zero trust security model uses contextual awareness, based on patterns of identity, time, and device posture to adaptively grant access to authorized users. With Citrix, this goes on in the background and is transparent to the user, so they have a productive, frictionless experience with technology.

“Security is a critical focus for us, and Citrix helps a great deal,” he says.

For Autodesk, as with many other organizations, their cloud strategy was validated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For us, the pandemic validated our vision of where we should be headed in the future,” he says. “Now we are doubling down and executing on that vision. Ultimately, every company will be a technology company. For those who have not invested enough in cloud or digitization, the pandemic was a wake-up call. Companies that are going to succeed in the future will have to accelerate the journey to cloud computing. Citrix is a great way to get there.”

Read Autodesk’s story.

Severn Trent Streams Reliable, High-Performance Cloud Desktops

As one of Britain’s largest water companies, Severn Trent is part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure. It must stay operational, whatever the situation. That means responding to unexpected business disruptions — such as a global pandemic — as well as ensuring that its own internal infrastructure delivers stable and reliable performance whenever, wherever, and however people need it.

Using Citrix Cloud services, Severn Trent modernized its existing Citrix environment to enable its staff to work from home using either personal or company devices. As IT Director Mark Gwynne told us:

“For everyone working from home, we were able to say if you don’t have a device at home you can use, we’ll provide you with [a] Chromebook. With the Citrix desktop, we were able to deploy a lot of very low-cost, energy efficient devices very quickly to give people the same performance as they had in the office. We did not experience any productivity issues. That’s been a great success for us.”

The DaaS environment delivers personal productivity improvements for staff and gives Severn Trent the ability to respond quickly to changing business needs:

“Deploying more servers into an on-premises estate is a pretty lengthy process, but doing that in Azure with Citrix Cloud services is pretty seamless,” he says. “We can scale up whenever it is needed. We don’t have to try to anticipate what the business might want to do next, because being in the cloud cuts lead times from months to minutes.”

You can read Severn Trent’s story, here.

Northumbria University Gives Students the Resources They Need, Wherever They Are

One of the UK’s top universities, Northumbria understands the importance of providing users — whether staff or students — with the best experience possible.

The university has a hybrid environment of cloud and on-premises servers and uses Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops with Azure Virtual Desktop to deliver a secure and familiar desktop to any device. Alan Blakey. Northumbria’s Client Software Manager explains:

“Citrix was our first choice because of the flexibility, scalability, and manageability it offers. Azure Virtual Desktop enables us to deliver familiar desktops at pace. Citrix completes the picture by feeding in the relevant applications, reducing the complexity of management, and adding a level of control.”

The university can run a hybrid environment with a single, simple, and secure desktop that provides everything staff and students require for teaching/learning resources and collaboration.

“Some applications work better from our on-premises servers so these can be fed into the cloud image from our datacenter,” Blakey says. “We’ve put virtual desktops on-premises and in the cloud so we have complete flexibility about where we put the compute resources. It can be dedicated to a discreet desktop, in a server on some blade infrastructure under a hypervisor, or in Azure.”

The result, as IT Director Simon Corbett says, is that, “The user experience is excellent. It’s intuitive, and I’m a great believer in technology being simple to use. If you need a manual to use the technology, then we’ve put in the wrong solution. As a student or an academic you need to be spending your time learning or teaching your subject, not learning how to use the technology.”

Northumbria University’s story is here.

Embracing the Cloud with Ease

These are just four examples of how different organizations are using Citrix to support their cloud strategy, managing hybrid environments, delivering familiar, secure desktops, and empowering their people to work effectively wherever they need. Read each organization’s full story:

Would you like to learn more about how customers are using Citrix? Check out our recent post on green tech and sustainability and look for future posts on security and our work and productivity solutions.