Jun 10, 2021
As a cloud-native SIEM, Azure Sentinel offers significant cost benefits. They have seen Azure Sentinel and the promise of cloud-native SIEM result in cost savings, both direct and indirect, for many of their customers. The 2020 commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Azure Sentinel study, for example, found that Azure Sentinel delivered a 48% reduction in costs compared to legacy SIEMs, saving on expenses like licensing, storage, and infrastructure costs.
Microsoft are pleased to announce changes to the pricing of Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor Log Analytics that will offer you additional cost savings. These changes take effect on June 2.
The changes include:
New capacity reservation naming
Capacity reservations are now called commitment tiers. You will see this change reflected in your user interface, in documentation, as well as on Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor pricing pages and in the pricing calculator.
New, higher commitment tiers
They are introducing new commitment tiers for both Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor Log Analytics for higher data ingestion: 1 TB/Day, 2 TB/Day, and 5 TB/Day.
Changes to how we bill for data ingestion over your commitment tiers
They are also changing the way we bill for overage. Data ingested beyond your selected commitment tier will now be billed using the effective commitment tier rate, instead of the Pay-as-you-go rate, resulting in a lower bill.
For example, for Azure Sentinel in the East US region, if you are on a 500 GB/day commitment tier, you will now be billed for overage at $0.80/GB (i.e. the effective rate for that tier) instead of the $2/GB pay-as-you-go rate.
Simplification of commitment tiers
They are simplifying commitment tiers to make them easier to manage. You can now select from eight distinct commitment tiers, per your needs, and no longer need to manage tiers due to minor changes in data ingestion patterns.
As part of this change, any workspaces with commitment tiers greater than 500 GB/day will be reset to the lowest available commitment tier – 500 GB/day, 1 TB/day, 2 TB/day, or 5 TB/day. This change should lower your costs due to the lowered cost of overage.
For example, if you were previously on a 600 GB/day commitment tier, your commitment tier would now be to 500 GB/day. Due to the change in overage billing, on days when you ingest more than 600GB, you would get billed at the 500GB effective tier rate, and on days you ingest less than 600GB, you save money because you are at a lower commitment tier – saving you costs overall.
Learn More
We’re excited to help you save costs with these changes, and look forward to continuing to innovate with Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor Log Analytics.
Jun 10, 2021
VMware is undergoing a business model transition from perpetual-license software to subscription and software as a service (SaaS). In addition, a proliferation of new technologies, high user expectations, globalization, and the need for business continuity are all key factors driving a digital transformation across our major functions.
To effect this transformation, they have strategically steered our digital initiatives to drive growth and operational scale — all while delivering delightful experiences to customers, partners, and colleagues (employees).
Preparation is key
The transformation journey began over a decade ago based on foundational decisions that would impact how we operate in the future. Agility and flexibility were critical. They made decisions to build a modern and scalable infrastructure embedded with security-by-design and to embody a customer-first mindset in the way they work.  This foundation enabled them to innovate faster and be responsive to their customers’ dynamic needs.
The preparation focus was on three main areas:
- Culture and finding innovative ways to strengthen connections amongst a distributed workforce.
- Infrastructure and making early decisions that support a drive towards resiliency, security, and usability.
- Experience and how to enable any device, anywhere
A journey of human experience
Providing a superb experience requires all parts of the transformation to be aligned. Therefore, they created a connected journey across five key areas—people, process, data, policy, and systems. It is the ability to connect these dots that have enabled them to drive a holistic business transformation.
PEOPLE
A positive experience at every touchpoint, regardless of the stakeholder, is core to VMware’s digital transformation. They are rewriting the rules of the enterprise by pursuing a human-centric approach to all our initiatives. After all, technology, processes, data, and policies are only as effective as the people who bring these components to life. That’s why they established the VMware Digital Way, a modern approach to digital capability development. This represents the ethos for how they—as individuals and as a team—operate to deliver delightful experiences at every level.
Cultural change, as always, starts at the top. This is the reason VMware management-led from the front in promoting a customer-first mindset. The voice of customers is constantly monitored and listened to via in-product customer feedback surveys, their Customer Advisory Board, Skyline proactive support, and other channels. For their colleagues, this means embracing lean development methodologies, a fail-fast philosophy, and an agile approach to delivering quality products regardless of the changing environment. In turn, VMware IT enables colleagues to enjoy an equally positive experience
PROCESS
Process transformation requires a major shift in the traditional enterprise mindset as practices—and even teams—are rationalized and modernized by breaking down existing silos. An example of this was the complete redesign of their New Service Introduction process that enabled them to reduce the cycle-time to launch new SaaS offerings by 33%[1].
DATA
Data transformation goes beyond collecting and storing data. It is about empowering their colleagues to operate with a data-driven mindset to produce actionable insights that can inform decision-making. And with this data, they can create a baseline of where we stand today and drive progress towards specific business outcomes. An example of this was automating the reporting of monthly and annual recurring revenue (MRR/ARR) and churn to help them dynamically monitor our SaaS business growth.
POLICY
VMware is on a relentless drive to reshape outdated policies that hinder speed and growth. This led them to create the SaaS Policy Board, an executive committee that met weekly and adhered to compressed decision-making timelines for a variety of policies impacting the SaaS business, covering areas such as renewals, sales compensation, and discounting.
SYSTEMS
To accelerate their digital transformation journey, VMware IT has had to deliver new capabilities in an accelerated timeframe while also improving performance and user experience. Their teams modernized several mission-critical applications by leveraging VMware IT’s Chief Digital Transformation Office (CDTO) Modern Application Platform (MAP), powered by VMware Tanzu™.
One excellent example is the modernization of their My VMware portal (since then updated and rebranded as VMware Customer ConnectTM) used by millions of their customers to download software binaries, manage licenses, and request support. Modernization of My VMware delivered a 40 percent improvement in service response time[1], saved 1,000 person-hours in maintenance[2], and over 25 percent in annual license savings[3].
They continue to find ways to augment and deliver delightful experiences for our customers, partners, and colleagues. Equally important is their focus on enabling their customers to be future-ready. This means continuing to deliver products and services that provide flexibility and Intrinsic security so that their customers can continue to rely on them.
Contact us to learn more, we would love to hear from you
Jun 10, 2021
Now more than ever, leaders in small to midsized businesses need to embrace digitalization, and quickly. Expectations have changed. The customer experience has changed. Business as we know it has changed, and you need systems that allow for your small to midsized business to adapt with the evolving landscape.
Take a guided tour to see how Dynamics 365 Business Central helps you:
- Adapt faster using flexible deployment options and innovative solutions that allow you to migrate to the cloud with confidence.
- Work smarter with connectivity between Office 365, Teams, and your business systems to improve productivity across the board.
Perform better through increased business visibility and knowledge-sharing with anytime, anywhere access.
May 20, 2021
What VMware Cloud Universal Delivers
VMware Cloud Infrastructure
Access enterprise-class compute, storage, networking, and management cloud services for maximum flexibility, resiliency, and portability for existing enterprise workloads.
Data Center, Edge, and Public Cloud
Enjoy flexible subscription infrastructure entitlements to consume VMware Cloud Foundation on-premises, VMware Cloud on AWS, or VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.
Manage Kubernetes and VMs in a single platform with VMware Tanzu, enabling container-based orchestration and development for cloud native applications.
Flexible Subscription Economics
Enable budget flexibility by adjusting spend and workloads across public and private clouds and leveraging subscriptions with one-year or three-year terms.
Products Included in VMware Cloud Universal
Customer-managed private clouds leveraging subscription economics.
VMware-managed local cloud as-a-service, delivering the cloud for on-premises deployment.
Comprehensive success offering providing dedicated and proactive support.
VMware-managed native cloud service leveraging global AWS infrastructure.
Reliably deploy and run containerized workloads across private and public clouds.*
*Tanzu Standard is included with VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription.
Use Cases for VMware Cloud Universal
Hybrid Cloud
Optimize your infrastructure investments with support for workloads deployed both on-premises and in the public cloud.
Cloud Migration
Deliver the industry’s fastest cloud migration capabilities for all enterprise workloads.
Cloud Bursting
Rapidly scale up infrastructure resources as application and user demands increase.
May 20, 2021
what happens when organizations in the middle of transformation initiatives — or who haven’t even begun yet — are suddenly faced with mandates to migrate to the cloud?
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be a test case for the ability to accomplish cloud migrations on tightly compressed schedules. While some scheduled migrations were pushed back, others were suddenly placed on the front burner. Notably, state and local governments which had been among the slowest to adopt the cloud were now faced with work-from-home mandates while still expected to deliver key public services. IT departments, already dealing with disrupted operations, were pressured to implement work-from-home arrangements and needed to be in the cloud immediately. Files in on-premises network drives and other assets located behind the firewall needed to be made accessible. Telephone systems needed to be reconfigured to forward calls.
A call to arms — and managed service providers
Organizations needing to cloudify in short order turned to trusted managed service providers with the specialized knowledge to handle migrating key applications and workloads to the cloud. What many discovered is that thanks to online tools, the essential infrastructure to enable a secure remote work plan could be in place, migrated to the cloud on a compressed timeline, and without compromising continuity of services. Part of this success was due to the prevalence of office suites, with their multiple tools for productivity, shared file storage and collaboration.
Lessons learned from experience
The experience gained applies to any IT organization or MSP needing to pull off a critical migration in short order. One challenge to take into account is the demand placed on the cloud infrastructure. During the pandemic, with so many organizations doing remote work, the immense scalability of the cloud came to the test, and for the most part it shined. However, especially as use of online file stores such as SharePoint Online and OneDrive skyrocketed, Microsoft and Google throttled traffic, especially during peak business hours and some migrations ran into capacity issues and took longer than expected.
Since the tools are themselves in the cloud, in many instances the entire migration task could be performed without an onsite visit — a key advantage given stay-at-home mandates. If the IP addresses (or URLs) and administrative credentials are known, the entire process can complete remotely. Migrating an entire workforce to the cloud for basic collaboration, using email and applications such as Teams or Skype, can be accomplished in anywhere from 24 hours to a long weekend. With careful pre-planning and consideration to details, organizations are able to shift to remote work without missing a beat. The details include:
- Migrating emails first to keep the lines of communication open
- Using date ranges to migrate the most-essential emails selectively
- Paying careful attention to data volume during the migration to avoid overusing bandwith, which could trigger throttling by Microsoft or Google
Provided the number of users, size of the mailboxes and total volume of data are not overly large, an organization can be ready for remote working with a new cloud instance in a long weekend. The rest of the migration can follow in the days after, backfilling the email boxes with the balance of the emails. Migration of less-essential files in online stores can take advantage of off-peak hours and weekends when throttling is less of an issue.
Mission accomplished — with more to come
The good news is, once the migration is complete, organizations are in a much better position to effect digital transformation for other key processes, and position themselves for the long term future of remote work
May 19, 2021
Microsoft has introduced the first per-user Power BI Premium offers. Power BI Premium is currently sold only in a capacity construct.
Power BI Premium Per User provides access to enterprise business intelligence (BI) and analytics capabilities. Its flexible individual seat licensing caters to small and medium-sized businesses.
Power BI Premium Per User allows organizations to license Premium features on a per-user basis.
Premium Per User (PPU) includes all Power BI Pro license capabilities, and also adds features such as paginated reports, AI, and other capabilities that are only available to Premium subscribers.
With a PPU license, you do not need a separate Power BI Pro license, as all Pro license capabilities are included in PPU.
You can get a trial version of Premium Per User (PPU) through Microsoft 365, as long as your organization has not restricted PPU licenses. Trials are enabled through the portal, similar to how Power BI Pro licenses are initiated.
The following table describes the Premium Per User (PPU) features against a Premium capacity:
Apr 12, 2021
This year’s Cyber Protection Week Global Report shows that organizations around the world are still grappling with the changes sparked by COVID and the modern cyberthreat landscape.
Businesses are acutely aware of the challenges facing them – from data privacy regulations to remote worker support to data theft, malware, phishing attacks and more – but their strategies to overcome them simply aren’t working. Half of the organizations Acronis surveyed saw data loss that led to downtime in the past year despite all of their work to stay protected.
For IT service providers offering modern cyber protection, these findings represent a significant opportunity to deliver more reliable, comprehensive, and effective protection services and unlock expanded revenue streams with both existing and new clients along the way.
Ready to offer your clients modern cyber protection? Here’s how you can get started.
Deliver simplified cyber protection
Acronis research finds that organizations are approaching security with the idea that more solutions will create more protection. Nearly 80% of the IT pros surveyed for the 2021 Cyber Protection Week Global Report have up to 10 different protection solutions and agents running simultaneously to deliver capabilities like
- Ransomware protection and remediation
- Anti-malware with zero-day threat prevention
- Automated patch management
- Vulnerability assessments
- URL filtering
- Continuous data protection
- Hard drive health monitoring
- Backup forensics
With their new no-charge licensing for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, service providers can eliminate the complexity of these patchwork IT stacks. They can deliver all of these capabilities to clients through a single solution, installed via one agent and managed through one console – simplifying their own deployment and management efforts.
Reduce the risk of today’s worst cyberthreats
In 2020, the FBI reported that cybercrime rose by 400% as cybercriminals exploited a global workforce adjusting to remote work. Every week, headlines announced data breaches and, according to our report, concerns about cyberthreats were almost universally high, regardless of threat type, business size, region, or industry. The cyberthreats IT pros are most concerned about include:
- Data theft
- Malware
- Phishing attacks
- Ransomware
- IoT attacks
- DoS / DDoS attacks
- Cryptojacking
Offering cyber protection solutions like Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud ensures that you can provide proactive, active, and reactive defenses against all modern cyberthreats – including the waves of new, zero-day threats that are emerging each day – while keeping your clients in compliance with the unique regulations they’re subject to.
Build in flexibility for unique client requirements
Clients will always value services that are customized to their environments and priorities over a one-size-fits-all approach to IT.
And as we learned in this year’s report, these priorities can vary significantly, including everything from data privacy and modernized cybersecurity stacks to migrating to the cloud and updating websites.
- Data privacy and compliance – 48%
- Modernizing cybersecurity stack, reducing risk – 45.3%
- Supporting improved remote-work environments – 39%
- Building a disaster recovery program – 34%
- Bridging the IT skills gap – 32%
- Rearchitecting networks – 31%
- Migrating infrastructure and/or applications to the cloud – 24%
- Reducing infrastructure complexity – 23%
- Website updates – 16%
With Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, MSPs can expand their service portfolio to meet client requirements and market demand with advanced protection packs that extend their capabilities. By adding advanced protection packs such as Advanced Backup, Advanced Security, Advanced Disaster Recovery, and Advanced Management to customize their services to deliver the optimum level of cyber protection for each client and every workload.
No-charge access to Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
It’s now easier than ever for service providers to seize the opportunities highlighted by the Cyber Protection Week Global Report. Today Acronis unveiled a new, no-charge version of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud that makes it more profitable for service providers to design and offer a comprehensive cyber protection services portfolio with little to no upfront costs.
Featuring a set of essential cyber protection capabilities included at no cost or on a pay-as-you-go basis, the new version of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud enables MSPs to build services, ensuring 100% coverage of clients’ workloads with cyber protection.
Learn more about the new licensing for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud on [email protected]
Apr 12, 2021
As customers move beyond immediate crisis needs, such as enabling remote work, many are accelerating cloud adoption to increase competitive advantage and stay more digitally resilient. Enabling an agile, scalable, high-performing, and reliable infrastructure is critical to long-term success. Microsoft is committed to continuous innovation in Azure IaaSÂ capabilities to help customers achieve these goals.
Microsoft is announcing new updates to the Azure infrastructure portfolio that help address a wide range of customer needs.
Increase agility with access to more choices and flexibility
Being responsive to rapidly changing business requirements is more important than it has ever been. Organizations need choices and flexibility in their cloud investments to stay agile. New innovations in Azure provide our customers with even more options, and these updates give customers the ultimate flexibility they need.
More options to run memory-intensive workloads. New Msv2 medium memory virtual machines (VMs), available in preview, enable customers to achieve up to a 20 percent increase in central processing units (CPU) performance and access up to 192 vCPU and 4TiB of memory. New Azure Dedicated Host stock keeping unit (SKUs), available soon in preview, let customers run a broader range of memory-intensive workloads in a single-tenant, hardware-isolated environment.
Simplified acquisition of compute capacity at deep discounts. New Azure Spot Virtual Machines (Spot VMs) features, in preview, help customers drastically improve the overall runtime of scale-out apps by letting Azure try and redeploy previously evicted Spot VMs as part of a scale set. Customers can also simulate evictions to test app behavior to ensure tolerance to interruptions.
More options to scale hybrid and edge deployments. The integration of VMware SD-WAN and the Azure Virtual WAN hub, available in preview, allows customers to easily connect branch offices and remote locations to Azure through VMware SD-WAN and take advantage of a complete Secure Access Service Edge solution. Azure Route Server—now in preview, helps customers streamline operations between any networking appliance and Azure’s virtual network by facilitating dynamic routing.
New capabilities to manage Linux environments. Last fall, Microsoft launched Azure Automanage to help customers greatly simplify Windows virtual machine management in Azure. We are now extending Azure Automanage capabilities to Linux Virtual Machines, giving customers the convenience to manage Windows and Linux VMs through one control plane. Additionally, the preview of Azure native integration with Elastic allows customers using Elastic services on Azure to access integrated billing, full technical support, and Azure portal integration.
Scale business-critical apps and improve performance
Many customers are migrating to the cloud to scale their most demanding workloads to achieve efficiency and performance gains. Azure offers one of the fastest networks with the broadest global footprint, enabling customers to build and deploy apps anywhere. They continue to innovate and make it easier for customers to increase workload scale and performance.
Simplified network resource distribution with new Azure Load Balancing capabilities. The new Azure Load Balancing selection tool, now in preview, offers customers guidance to choose the right services based on their workloads and requirements. They’re also increasing flexibility to load balance across IP addresses with Azure Load Balancer, now generally available.
More options to scale deployments with new Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets features. Customers can simplify application deployment, management, and scalability while improving uptime with the recently introduced flexible orchestration mode. Customers can also gain greater operational agility by changing virtual machine sizes without redeploying the scale set and optimize costs by mixing Spot VMs and pay-as-you-go virtual machines within the same scale set.
Scaling disk performance with new performance tiers on premium SSDs. With the new capability in preview, customers can sustain a higher level of performance for planned events, such as a seasonal promotion, and change performance tiers without disruption to their workloads.
Strengthen business continuity with new reliability and security enhancements
Azure provides built-in high-availability and disaster recovery options to ensure maximum resilience for all workloads. We continue our infrastructure investments, including expanding our already leading number of regions and availability zones and are launching new services to keep apps and data resilient and secure on Azure.
Improving high availability with new on-demand capacity reservations. On-demand capacity reservations, now in preview, enable customers to reserve compute capacity for one or more virtual machine size in an Azure region or Availability Zone for any length of time. Customers can also combine capacity reservations with Reserved Virtual Machine Instances to greatly reduce costs.
Increasing workload portability and availability. Azure Resource Mover, now generally available, lets customers seamlessly move resources between public Azure regions. Customers can also increase workload availability with protection in the event of a zone failure with Zone Redundant Storage support for Premium and Standard SSDs, available in preview.
Built-in backup management at scale with Azure Backup Center. Azure Backup Center, now generally available, supports all Azure-based workloads supported by Azure Backup and offers new Azure policies to deploy backups at scale based on resource groups and tags.
Protection for data-in-use with Azure Confidential Computing. Customers can harden workloads and protect against malicious attacks with Trusted Launch for all Azure Virtual Machines, available in preview. They’re also safeguarding sensitive data in Azure with the preview of SQL Always Encrypted secure enclaves and enabling secure orchestration of confidential containers on Azure Kubernetes Service, now generally available.
Protection for apps and data with auto-key rotation. With the preview of the new feature, customers can automatically update all disks, snapshots, and images, and ensure their data is always secured with the latest encryption key.
Accelerate cloud migration with confidence
Microsoft and BPS will help customers accelerate cloud migration with first-class migration tooling, support, skilling, and resources. New capabilities are continuously being added to Azure Migrate.
Centralized migration across all infrastructure, apps, and data. With new features in Azure Migrate, customers can now assess SQL Server estates with the preview of discovery and assessment for SQL Server migration to Azure SQL.
Additional new features include the general availability of PowerShell support for migration of VMware virtual machines and the preview of a new app containerization tool allowing customers to migrate .NET and web apps to Azure Kubernetes Service.
Apr 12, 2021
In the purpose of generating more value for the customer and making it easier to provide a great employee experience, Citrix added new features specifically designed to improve the user experience and the IT experience associated with Citrix most popular Workspace service, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.
Let’s take a look.
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Adds New Self-Service User Integrations
For the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, they’ve added new integrations that enable users (and admins) to search for and perform self-service actions directly from Citrix Workspace.
Users can check the status of associated machines that are faulty and perform operations such as restart, disconnect, and log off. These self-service features can greatly reduce help desk support tickets. Here’s a brief description of what each of the three key functions enable you to do:
- My Desktops:Â Search for your faulty Citrix Virtual Desktops and perform self-service actions such as restarting from Citrix Workspace.
- My Sessions:Â Search for your Citrix virtual sessions and perform self-service actions from Citrix Workspace such as logging off and disconnecting.
- Virtual Desktops (Admin Mode):Â Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops admins can look up faulty machines, view their details, put machines into maintenance mode, and restart them, all from Citrix Workspace.
These self-service integrations from Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service are currently available for all customers with microapp service entitlements.
Easy DaaS Capabilities for All Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service Customers with Citrix Managed Azure
The Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service continues to be the go-to solution for customers on a cloud journey, regardless of where they are on the hybrid-cloud spectrum. Citrix’s goal has always been for customers to bring together on-premises deployments alongside public-cloud hosting to meet their business needs and move to the cloud at their own pace.
With their new Citrix Managed Azure offering, customers now have the option to deploy DaaS workloads directly from their Citrix Cloud consoles.
If you are using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service today with an on-premises workload deployment and are eager to make the transition to the cloud, this is a great place to start.
Citrix Managed Azure offers the fastest path to hybrid-cloud benefits. You can add consumption-based Citrix Managed Azure funds to your account and be up and running with your new apps and desktops in a matter of minutes. If you want to make things even easier, you can purchase Citrix Managed Azure directly from the Azure Marketplace.
Connect SAML as an Identity Provider to Citrix Cloud (Preview)
Citrix Cloud now supports using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) as an identity provider to authenticate subscribers signing in to their workspaces. (Please note, this is currently in preview status.) Use the SAML provider of your choice — provided it supports SAML 2.0 — with your on-premises Active Directory (AD). Learn more here.
Citrix Workspace App Improvements for Windows and Linux
The Citrix Workspace app teams are constantly innovating to enable the latest features and enhancements on any device and platform. In March, they’ve had some big new enhancements to the Citrix Workspace app for Windows and Linux. Here’s a brief description:
- Windows: Citrix Workspace app for Windows now runs in an emulator mode on ARM64 devices, including the Microsoft Surface Pro X. ARM64 device users can get a powerful digital workspace solution that provides the flexibility and freedom they need. Organizations benefit from centralized management, which ultimately enables the delivery of a superior employee experience.
- Linux: With the latest release, they have increased virtual channel capacity from 32 to 64. That means customers and partners can add more custom virtual channels for virtual apps and desktops. To enhance the experience for users who leverage multi-monitor setups, they’ve added screen pinning to improve productivity. This is especially relevant for financial traders who use multiple desktops, because now they can easily launch virtual desktops with the layout they prefer and retain it every time.
Citrix Analytics for Security Adds Geofencing Controls
Geofencing is now available with Citrix Analytics for Security. Customers can use preconfigured custom risk indicators to enable this feature. When configured, Citrix Analytics for Security evaluates the geographic location of every user attempting access through Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix Gateway, or Citrix Content Collaboration. Admins can set up implicit deny lists to ensure that anyone attempting to access corporate resources from an unauthorized location is denied.
If a user attempts to log in from an unauthorized location, an authorization request is sent to them. If the user doesn’t acknowledge the request or confirms they didn’t request access, the account is locked. This new capability is a must-have for any Citrix customer implementing a zero trust security model.
With the increase in remote work, it’s become more important than ever to understand the locations from which users access Citrix resources. The Access Assurance dashboard, now in preview, can help admins visualize access requests. The dashboard provides the total number of logons, unique users, number of countries with logins, and more. If administrators detect access requests from unauthorized locations, they can implement the newly-released geofencing capability to deny all requests from those locations.
Citrix Analytics for Performance Adds New Actions, Insights, Enhanced Visibility
- Availability Insights — We’ve had the ability to see whether VDAs are registered but no real insights into overall VDA availability/unavailability and how that affects the environment. Now we have this data and the corresponding insights.
- Actions — Previously, if admins needed to take actions on VDAs (e.g. restart, maintenance mode, etc.), they would have to use Director or Studio and leave the Analytics console. Now they can take these actions from Citrix Analytics, including properly draining users from machines for maintenance.
- Executive Visibility — Admins can now create executive-focused reports from search queries, save them, and schedule them to be run and emailed as required.
Citrix App Layering Adds Support for Google Cloud
Citrix App Layering is a Windows Operating System and application management solution designed for on-premises private clouds and public clouds. Citrix App Layering’s underlying technology enables all components of a virtual machine to be independently assigned, patched, and updated.
They have officially released Citrix App Layering support for Google Cloud! This support is the culmination of months of engineering effort and is the sixth platform that Citrix App Layering natively supports. Our customers now are able to consolidate and simplify app and image management in Google Cloud, just as they can with Azure, VMware, Hyper0V, Citrix Hypervisor, and Nutanix AHV.
Additional updates to Citrix App Layering include:
- The app layering management console is moving away from Silverlight to a more modern platform in a phased approach.
- They did exhaustive benchmarking to gain a deeper understanding of the interdependencies that are introduced with user layers, and we came away with more specific best practice guidance.
Citrix Web Studio Now Generally Available!
Citrix is pleased to announce that all Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service customers now have access to the new Citrix Web Studio! They’ve alluded to this feature in previous blog posts and incorporated your feedback into developing a robust admin experience when it comes to managing your Citrix services. This updated version brings new improvements and a visual refresh that will help admins simplify app and desktop management tasks.
With the new Citrix Web Studio, we experience interactions that are 15 percent faster across the board as compared to the previous Studio console. Customers in the preview have seen performance gains of up to 2x. They’ve also introduced new features, such as machine restart schedules. This feature was built for scenarios in which the restart schedules can be set around an end user’s usage patterns instead of rigid restarts based on set times. For more information on Web Studio, see our recent blog post.
Stayed tuned for next month’s What’s New with Citrix Workspace update. We’ll have another list of exciting new features for Citrix Workspace and we’ll show you how Citrix solutions can empower your users to do their best work, regardless of work location.
Apr 12, 2021
Cloud and edge scale units enable distribution of shop floor and warehouse execution workloads among different environments. This functionality can help improve performance, prevent service interruptions, and maximize uptime. It’s provided by the following add-ins:
- Cloud Scale Unit Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Companies that work with manufacturing and distribution must be able to run key business processes 24/7, without interruption and at scale. Cloud and edge scale units enable companies to run key mission-critical manufacturing and warehouse processes without interruption, even when faced with occasional network connectivity or latency issues.
Scale units and dedicated workloads
Scale units extend your central Supply Chain Management hub environment by adding dedicated processing capacity. Scale units can run in the cloud. Alternatively, they can run on the edge at your local facility premises. Scale units can temporarily be disconnected from the hub environment. When they are connected, scale units receive all the information that is required to run the dedicated processing for assigned workloads.
Dedicated manufacturing execution workload capabilities in a scale unit
For manufacturing execution, cloud and edge scale units deliver the following capabilities, even when the edge units aren’t connected to the cloud:
- Machine operators and shop floor supervisors can access the operational production plan.
- Machine operators can keep the plan up to date by running discrete and process manufacturing jobs.
- The shop floor supervisor can adjust the operational plan.
- Workers can access time and attendance for clock-in and clock-out on the edge, to ensure correct worker pay calculation.
Dedicated warehouse management workload capabilities in a scale unit
For warehouse management, cloud and edge scale units deliver the following capabilities, even when edge units aren’t connected to the cloud:
- Processing of selected wave methods is enabled for sales orders and demand replenishment.
- Warehouse workers can run sales and demand replenishment warehouse work by using the Warehouse Management mobile app.
- Warehouse workers can inquire into on-hand inventory by using the Warehouse Management mobile app.
- Warehouse workers can create and run inventory movements by using the Warehouse Management mobile app.
- Warehouse workers can register purchase orders and do put away by using the Warehouse Management mobile app.
