Citrix has been a leader in providing secure remote access to employees working from home or other locations for more than two decades. Traditionally, our customers issued corporate-owned devices to employees accessing their applications from home, using our virtualization technology for accessing Windows and Linux apps and desktops. They have been also using a VPN to access intranet applications or a third-party SSO to access SaaS applications.
With the recent changes in the way we work from remote locations, VPNs are becoming bottlenecks as well as a security risk, especially when we have most employees working remotely and looking to use their unmanaged and BYO devices to access data and applications. This has not only raised concerns around security, but also around employee privacy. Multiple point products add to the stress from the chaos in the existing situation, as most employees have to go through multiple logins to get to their applications, and IT has to manage multiple vendors and multiple products. It is not making life easy for anyone. This has affected productivity for both IT and employees, who are end users of these technologies.
Driven by a need to provide the best end-user experience and best-in-class security, customers are now looking at alternatives like zero trust network access (ZTNA) technologies to enable remote work and improve employee productivity and overall security for their digital workspaces. While Citrix Workspace provides unified, secure, and VPN-less access to all virtual, web, and SaaS applications deployed in a datacenter or in the cloud, we understand customers may choose to still deploy separate technologies to provide VPN-less access to end users.
Keeping our customers in mind and providing them a unified experience to access their applications, we’re now extending our deep collaboration to include Google’s BeyondCorp solution as a member of the BeyondCorp Alliance.
What Are We Announcing?
The first step in our journey brings together Workspace and BeyondCorp so all applications in a customer’s environment — on-premises, GCP, and SaaS — can be exposed through Citrix Workspace, adding BeyondCorp’s VPN-less access and policy enforcement. Users get a single pane of glass for all their applications, which can now be accessed from BYOD and non-corporate devices, without the need for a VPN. We are also exploring sharing of the endpoint signals with BeyondCorp to aid in policy evaluation and further extending policy enforcements for applications accessed through Citrix Workspace.
Value to Our Customers
Unlike other ZTNA vendors who push customers to reinvest from scratch and rip and replace, Citrix, with its Workspace solution combined with Google BeyondCorp, offers a choice of reusing existing investments customers have made in their infrastructure.
“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,” says Sridhar Mullapudi, Sr. Vice President or Product Management at Citrix. “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.”
Citrix Workspace allows unifying of applications within the same workspace portal. If you are using Citrix Workspace to access your desktops, Windows and Linux applications, you can now expand usage of Citrix Workspace to access applications you are leveraging through Google’s BeyondCorp, keeping your existing investments intact.
Check out our solution brief and learn more about how you can deliver workspace security and zero trust with Citrix and Google Cloud.
