Citrix Workspace and Google Cloud Extend Unified Collaboration; Empower Customers Adapt to the ‘Neo-normal’ Times

By Sudipto Ghosh On Oct 14, 2020

Citrix itself acknowledges that Google Cloud has always been the best place to run Citrix Workspace.

That’s why they are now extending their deep collaboration to include Google’s BeyondCorp solution as a member of the BeyondCorp Alliance to provide a user-centric unified experience to access their applications in a remote environment. Citrix Workspace allows the unification of applications within the same workspace portal.

Citrix Workspace users can access desktops, Windows and Linux applications to expand usage of Citrix Workspace. These would allow single- and multi-point device users to seamlessly access all Citrix applications through Google’s BeyondCorp.

Focus on User Experience and Employee Collaboration with Limited IT Services During the Pandemic

Dynamic technology duo, Citrix and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are redefining the remote workplace trend with their deep collaboration and enhanced unified experience. As part of their extended partnership, Citrix has included Google’s BeyondCorp solution as a member of the BeyondCorp Alliance. The newly fortified alliance will empower their joint customers to speed digital transformation across all departments whose employees are currently off-site or working from home. But, the most important aspect of this partnership has got everything to do with employee experience matched to growing security infrastructure managed remotely from home. Greater dependence on BYO devices and lack of IT support are posing a huge security risk — in addition to rampant usage of VPN applications at the employee side. Citrix Workspace and Google Cloud are solving this problem with a renewed technology alliance that is based on Machine Creation Services (MCS) to provision virtual machines in your Citrix Virtual Apps or Citrix Virtual Desktops service deployment.

Leading Organizations Are Accelerating Their Transition to the Cloud and Adopting Digital Workspace Strategies

In a recent press release announcement, Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President, Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Office, Citrix had said, “The global pandemic has caused companies to speed digital transformation and rethink their future workforce strategies and work models. Looking to emerge from the crisis stronger and more agile than before, leading organizations are accelerating their transition to the cloud and adopting digital workspace strategies that can deliver consistent and secure work experience to help employees perform at their best wherever work needs to get done – in the office, on the road, or at home.”

Partnering with GCP will definitely help Citrix expands its Workspace and BeyondCorp to needy customers in an app-based environment. As employee experience (EX) trends continue to evolve around flexible workspace and simplified employee engagement models, companies could benefit from the GCP-Citrix partnership, bringing a consistent, secure and reliable access to the resources people need to do their jobs whether working in the office, on the road, or at home.

Citrix has been a leader in providing secure remote access to employees working from home or other locations for more than two decades. Citrix Workspace is one of the most agile enterprise collaboration and employee engagement platforms. In a COVID-19 stricken world, tools like Citrix Workspace enhance employer’s remote workplace management with a simple “back-to-office” model that takes care of all the pertinent issues related to corporate-owned devices that employees find difficult to access and manage their applications from home. Citrix leverages GCP to expand its virtualization technology for accessing Windows and Linux apps and desktops. With VPNs posing greater security risks to the company-owned devices and data stores, securing remote employees is a must-do activity for all companies.

Citrix and GCP Move Strength to Strength on Zero Trust Network Access (Ztna) Technologies

Both Google Cloud and Citrix Workspace are pioneers in providing the best-in-class security and data management features on their products. When enterprise customers are looking for alternatives like zero trust network access (ZTNA) technologies to enable remote work, Citrix Workspace delivers an improved employee productivity and overall security for their digital workspaces in a VPN-free environment.

This means users can avail of unified, secure, and VPN-less access to all virtual, web, and SaaS applications deployed in a data center or in the Cloud.

Citrix Workspace and BeyondCorp is in sync with the On-premises, GCP, and SaaS, adding a verifiable layer of VPN-less access and policy enforcement that can be managed in a single interface. All reporting and analytics can now be accessed from BYOD and non-corporate devices, without the need for a VPN.

Citrix, with its Workspace solution combined with Google BeyondCorp, offers a choice of reusing existing investments customers have made in their infrastructure – a great philosophy in testing times. Usually, other ZTNA vendors mostly push customers to reinvest from scratch and rip and replace.

At the time of this announcement, Sridhar Mullapudi, Sr. Vice President or Product Management at Citrix said – “The situation today has forced businesses around the world to change the way that employees work, while still meeting performance and security requirements that today’s uncertain business environment demands. Giving customers a choice and helping them through these times is increasingly important and also helpful for our customers in their journey to zero trust.”