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Citrix to extend Workspace to Google Cloud
Fri, 24th May 2019
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Citrix continues to open up the world of IT to the possibilities of hybrid and multicloud, as the company announced that its Citrix Workspace will soon be available on Google Cloud.

According to Citrix, the extended availability will allow companies to transition to the cloud by enabling them to deliver applications to both Google devices, and operating systems.

“Many of our customers have existing software and infrastructure investments, yet still want the freedom to invest in their cloud future,” says Google Cloud's president of global customer operations, Rob Enslin.

“In expanding our partnership with Citrix, we can better help these customers with their transformations by enabling them to access and run the applications their businesses depend on anywhere—simply, flexibly and securely.

Citrix Workspace was previously available on Citrix Virtual Applications and Desktops. Now, companies that use Google Cloud will be able to modernise their applications and deliver unified access to Google devices. This, Citrix says, will create a ‘productivity powerhouse' for IT administrators and employees.

“Planned interoperability with Google's Cloud Identity, for instance, will allow for the seamless authentication of users using G Suite credentials to access Citrix Workspace, which will provide a more secure and unified end user experience,” the company explains.

In addition, the integration of intelligent capabilities into G Suite will enable companies to automatically notify employees of important events from their Google calendars through personalised feeds within Citrix Workspace. This can help boost engagement and productivity by removing the frustration of constantly switching applications and searching for information.

“In extending Citrix Workspace to Google Cloud, we're giving companies greater flexibility and choice in how they deploy the SaaS, cloud, and web applications their employees need to be engaged and productive and a simple, efficient way to do it,” says Citrix president and CEO David Henshall.

Using Citrix Virtual Applications and Desktops Machine Creation Service (MCS), IT will be able to provision Windows-based Citrix workloads at scale and create a modern digital work environment in which employees can access tools they need to collaborate and perform.

Automated provisioning for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is available on demand today and will be rolled out to all customers in the third quarter of 2019. Linux virtual desktops from Citrix will soon be supported on GCP as well.

Citrix Workspace for Google Cloud also allows companies to combine Citrix ADC and Citrix SD-WAN optimise and secure connectivity when transporting applications from GCP or connecting users to those resources.