As organizations move toward the cloud, it’s critical that the cloud solutions they choose are simple to manage, secure, and flexible enough to grow with ever-changing business needs.

Citrix and Google Cloud have partnered to meet that demand, bringing a better way to work to our joint customers. With Citrix Workspace on Google Cloud Platform, Chrome Enterprise, G Suite, and Citrix Networking on Google Cloud Platform, our solutions provide a secure and simple way to free you and your organization to work anywhere, anytime — and bring innovation to life.

Oncology Venture

One organization that is leveraging Citrix and Google Cloud together is Oncology Venture. A drug development company, Oncology Venture provides a precision-therapy platform to predict how cancer patients may respond to a specific treatment. But it faced the challenge of providing employees and globally dispersed third-party vendors with access to critical applications and desktops.

“We work with all kinds of partners,” Principal Infrastructure Engineer Ulrik Christensen says. “Our drug manufacturing is in India, and we are working with labs, clinicians, and contract research organizations (CROs) all around the world.”

Why Oncology Venture chose Citrix

Christensen and his organization chose Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

“We needed a standard desktop that would work on any endpoint: Apple, Windows, Google Chromebook or mobile phone,” he says. “The alternative was spending three or four hours a day on basic support issues. We chose Citrix because we know it works. Citrix just makes things easier.”

Performance

While evaluating different cloud solutions, Christensen and his organization determined a number of challenges to address when choosing a solution. The first was performance.

“We were running our workloads on another cloud provider, but the performance was really affecting us,” he says.

Oncology Venture chose Google Cloud Platform over other solutions.

“We ran some tests on Google Cloud, and we realized that GCP could provide much better performance — up to a 3x performance improvement, in fact!”

“When we told Citrix what we had in mind, I was invited to join the early adopter program for Machine Creation Service (MCS) for Google Cloud,” he says. “MCS is an essential feature for the solution to work. They have been very helpful in getting us up and running on Google Cloud. With MCS, I save about 10 hours per month. But more than that, the workflow is better so I can respond more quickly to staff requests. I can add new apps or functionality within a few hours and it only needs a system reboot. Often, users don’t even notice.”

Security

The second challenge was security. With any organization, security is the key component to ensuring that confidential and proprietary data is protected. Christensen and his team chose Citrix Files to securely share information with clients and partner firms.

“It’s our primary system,” Christensen says. “We don’t have files on USB drives. Everything is kept securely in our data center.”

And with Google Cloud and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Christensen and his team were able to easily grant secure access to apps and desktops to employees and vendors who need it by creating security profiles.

Scalability

The third challenge was scalability. As Oncology Venture’s business grows, the organization didn’t want to choose a solution that would quickly become antiquated.

“It was essential for us to be able to get access to resources easy and fast,” Christensen says. “We didn’t want to tie up your capital into hardware. We saw it as a better solution for us to have a pay-as-you-go strategy. When it comes to our DRP platform, we need to able to scale up and down quickly.”

Now with Google Cloud, Christensen has seen a remarkable increase in performance and scalability.

“Patient data analysis can take up to 15 minutes to process. Before we were able to run eight patient analysis simultaneously,” Christensen says. “Hospitals can now run as many as they want depending on how many containers they want to allocate — no limit. Thousands of patients at the same time and it is only a matter of allocation of cloud resources. A month ago, we ran 1,500 patients’ analyses in 2.5 weeks. If we run that in Google Cloud, we can do it in an hour.”

Partnering for future growth

Oncology Venture and its pioneering development of cancer drugs is set for major growth, and Citrix and Google Cloud will be alongside to support Christensen as the business expands.

“We are being asked to deliver more and more on Citrix, because people know it works,” he says. “And, we’re ready to work other partner companies very quickly because of Citrix. On IT, we used to lag behind other organizations. With Citrix, we can do things faster and easier. We’re now leading the way and offering better service to our partners, as well.”

For more information, check out Christensen’s blog post on how Machine Creation Services on Google Cloud Platform is making managing workloads easier. And learn how Citrix and Google Cloud are working together to bring innovation to life.