In our most recent blog, we described how we often encounter clients where the IT staff has been timidly afraid to “mess” with a new, pristine Citrix environment. As we wrote, the problem with this way of thinking is that a well-run Citrix environment needs regular care and feeding in order to remain fully functional. IT staff that fails to stay on top of Citrix IT is dooming the environment to failure.
Today, we’re going to address the opposite situation, which we also see fairly frequently.
We know your IT staff is good. They’re probably even great. They’ve saved the company’s bacon time and again, and you’re proud of the work they do.
You’ll Pay for their Inexperience
But are they truly Citrix experts? Are they in over their heads without realizing it? A great Microsoft guy does not automatically make a great Citrix/Remote Desktop Services guy. What we see all too often are situations in which a company’s really good IT people, who’ve worked hard for years, solving numerous crisis situations, are nevertheless ill-equipped to deal with the vagaries of Citrix. And what’s worse is that sometimes these folks unfortunately don’t realize their deficiencies in the world of virtual environments. They think they know exactly what they’re doing and so blaze in unafraid, with the unfortunate result of mucking everything up.
These folks have that “let’s just get ‘er done” mindset, and tear into things, determined to figure it all out. They know they’re pretty smart IT-wise, having leapt many hurdles in the course of their career.
Those are exactly the people you want on your team, right? Except when it comes to Citrix. Unfortunately, with a system as complex as Citrix, bravado is no substitute for experience. All the confidence in the world isn’t going to fix the smoking pile of plastic that used to be your wickedly fast Citrix environment. A Citrix environment is a very complicated one. Many moving parts need to be constantly monitored and adjusted. There needs to be a fundamental understanding of how changes in Citrix, group policy, storage, etc., impact downstream components. To do Citrix right, you really need Citrix experts, techs and architects who have years of experience architecting and managing Citrix environments.
You end up on the phone with Citrix for an outrageously painful 2+ hours just to get past level 1 support and up to six hours to get to someone that can bail you out. Or you have to bring in “experts” who have no familiarity with your setup and spend the first 8 hours (at $200-$325/hour) just trying to understand your network, before even thinking about tackling the actual problem.
A Better Way
Whitehat’s Citrix Managed Services Program instantly adds several certified Citrix experts to your IT team, with 24/7 availability, at a monthly retainer cost considerably less than what you just paid for that desperate call to Citrix. Our folks REALLY know Citrix; we have experience architecting and managing hundreds of Citrix environments. We’ll free up your IT staff to focus on their strengths, while we keep your virtual desktop infrastructure humming along trouble-free.
Perhaps one of the best benefits is all about incentive. In this model, when an issue impacts your productivity, it also directly impacts Whitehat, giving us built-in incentive to eliminate the source of the problem as rapidly as possible. Your tickets cost us money, so we have a vested interest in preventing as many tickets as possible and quickly resolving the ones that do trickle in.
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