Streamlining Citrix Cloud Operations

The client was running an aging on-premises Citrix infrastructure that was becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. Hardware refresh cycles, licensing complexity, and the overhead of managing hypervisors, storage, and networking in-house were consuming a disproportionate share of the IT budget. Leadership wanted to move to Citrix Cloud to reduce operational burden, but they were concerned about maintaining performance for their user base (spread across multiple geographic regions), ensuring a smooth migration with minimal downtime, and keeping costs predictable after the move. Previous attempts at cloud migration for other workloads had resulted in unexpected cost overruns, so there was healthy skepticism about cloud economics that needed to be addressed with real numbers.

We designed a phased migration plan that moved workloads to Citrix Cloud with resource locations in AWS across two regions to serve the client's geographic footprint. Before migrating any users, we built a detailed cost model comparing current on-premises TCO against projected cloud costs, accounting for compute, storage, egress, licensing, and the labor savings from reduced infrastructure management. We migrated users in waves, starting with a pilot group of 200 users to validate performance, then scaling up in batches of 500. Each wave included performance benchmarking against on-premises baselines so we could catch and address any regressions immediately. We implemented auto-scaling policies that spin up additional capacity during business hours and scale down overnight and on weekends, which was the key to keeping costs predictable. We also automated image management with a CI/CD pipeline for golden images, so updates that previously required hours of manual work now deploy automatically with rollback capabilities.