Office of the Chief Information Officer

United States Department of Agriculture

Virtual Application Desktop (Citrix)

Service Description

The NITC Virtual Desktop service provides the technology necessary to enable the hosting of workstation-centric business applications remotely in the NITC Enterprise Data Center. Combined with other key enabling NITC cloud services, the Virtual Desktop service can provide a practically identical end user experience for workstation-centric applications while simplifying the management of desktop software installation and maintenance as well as providing a secure remote access solution.

What's Included

  • Fully managed and maintained infrastructure
    - State-of-the-art server hardware & software
    - Period technology refresh
  • Both shared and dedicated solutions available
  • CitrixTMXenAppTM
    - Virtual presentation of specific applications
    - Most cost effective virtual desktop solution
  • CitrixTMXenDesktopTM
    - Virtual presentation of complete desktop
    - Provides users with desktop functionality

How We Charge

Costs are based on actual application hosting requirements and virtual application integration services required.

Price drivers

  • Actual shared or dedicated hosting requirements
  • Number of concurrent users of XenApp™ integrated applications
  • Number of XenDesktop™ integrated desktops
  • Virtual Desktop application integration services as required

Service Level Metrics

Measure Target SLA
System Monitoring 24 x 7
Incident Response 24 x 7
System Availability 99.99% excluding planned downtime*

* - NITC reserves the option to schedule routine infrastructure maintenance activities on Sundays between 1800 to 2400 hours Central Time.

NOTE: NITC utilizes the USDA Universal Telecommunication Network (UTN) for Wide Area Network services. The UTN is contractually guaranteed to be 99.9% available but has historically delivered 99.997% availability.

Cost Saving Tips

  • Utilize other OCIO service offerings to minimize application integration efforts and reduce costs through economies of scale

Download the Platform as a Service - Virtual Application Desktop (Citrix) page from the NITC Service Catalog.