What’s Up in the Cloud: G Suite Essentials Offered for Free, Anthos Expansion, Healthcare API, More

Since our last post, we’ve all been settling into the new reality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. For Google Cloud and at Maven Wave alike, that means supporting businesses during this unprecedented time, whether that be by implementing bots to help handle COVID-19 inquiries at healthcare providers or ensuring organizations have access to G Suite to stay connected from home. Read on for details on this and our round-up of the latest in the Google Cloud ecosystem:

• Alphabet cites Google Cloud in Q1 results as key aspect of diversified business: Alphabet reported its Q1 2020 results and noted its Cloud business as a key aspect of its business to be optimistic about during the current pandemic. Specifically, CEO Sundar Pichai noted that diversification across the Cloud platform has helped them support businesses across several industries during this time.
• Google Meet for individuals, G Suite Essentials for organizations, available for free: Google has announced that it is offering free access for organizations to G Suite Essentials through Sept. 30. G Suite Essentials includes access to Meet’s more advanced features and Google Drive. Meet will also be available for everyone in the coming weeks.
• Google adds four in-demand features to Meet: Google has introduced four of their top-requested Meet features to the tool. These include a tiled layout view to see up to 16 users at once, the ability to present high-quality video content with audio, a low-light mode, and noise cancellation. 
• Anthos expansion includes support for more clouds and types of workloads: Google has announced that Anthos support for multi-cloud is now generally available. With this, enterprises can now centralize operations across on-premise set-ups, Google Cloud, and other clouds, starting with AWS. The expansion also provides deeper support for virtual machines.
• How chatbots and Google’s Rapid Response Virtual Agent bring healthcare home: Bots can help healthcare organizations deal with high traffic during the current pandemic and improve patient experience in the long-term. Stream our webinar to learn how BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee developed a bot to serve its members and to see a demo of Google’s Rapid Response Virtual Agent.
• Google Healthcare API and other solutions to support healthcare and life sciences to organizations during COVID-19: Google has announced the general availability of its Healthcare API and details on its other solutions for supporting healthcare and life sciences organizations during the current pandemic. These include virtual and telehealth services, collaboration tools, its Rapid Response Virtual Agent, and Google Cloud research credits.
• How Google Maps Platform is visualizing helpful info to address COIVD-19: Google shared examples on its blog of how Maps Platform is being used to visualize data during COVID-19 in several ways, including showing the number of cases by location, finding masks for healthcare providers, locating doctors, and identifying restaurants open for takeout.
• Google adds 6 new security-focused controls to G Suite: Google has implemented six new G Suite devices, data, and user controls to strengthen security. These include controls to secure devices remotely, protect your organizations’ data, manage users across the world with context-aware access, and monitor G Suite and Google Cloud Platform logs in one place.
• How to add “buy online, pick-up in store” capabilities to retailer websites with Google Maps Platform: Google shared a post with details on the different APIs that companies can use within Google Maps Platform to support the need for customers to place orders online and pick-up in store. These APIs help simplify checkout, identify the best pick-up location, give directions for pick-up, and use traffic data to estimate the customer’s arrival time.

Maven Wave has created a set of rapid response services in response to COVID-19 to assist businesses manage the influx of patient inquiries, enable remote work and patient care, and track healthcare trends. If you have immediate needs in one of these areas, you can learn more here. And don’t forget to come back in a few weeks for more updates from Maven Wave and Google Cloud.