cloud information: 2018

Thursday 2 August 2018

Some Takeaways from Google Cloud Next’18

Last week, our team joined over 25,000 attendees, partners, sponsors and industry experts in San Francisco for Google Cloud Next’18. We had quite the turnout at our booth where we were able to demonstrate itopia Cloud Automation Stack (CAS) to a wide variety of cloud enthusiasts. We also introduced new capabilities of CAS, including the extension of on-premises Active Directory domain to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) across multiple regions and zones for disaster recovery—a feature that was called out in the session: “Best Practices for Extending On Premises Active Directory with Applications in GCP”. We also showcased our server-only automation and management capabilities on GCP and virtual graphics workstation capabilities powered by NVIDIA GPU accelerators and Teradici’s high-performance protocol, PCoIP.

While much of the content was focused on AI and machine learning (ML), Google also made some significant announcements around G Suite, many of which are also part of the company’s wider AI/ML push. As a Google Cloud Technology Partner and G Suite customer, we were particularly interested in these ones.

Overview of G Suite Announcements at Google Cloud Next’18

Security Center for G Suite: While Google Cloud announced the security center earlier in the year, the company revealed a new investigation tool at Next’18. The tool enables IT administrators to identify potentially infected users, see if anything has been shared externally and remove access to files in Drive or delete malicious emails from the same UI they manage prevention and intrusion controls. This eliminates the time consuming task of analyzing logs which often requires complex scripting.
Support for Data Regions: Customers now have the option to choose where to store data for select G Suite apps to better comply with regional regulatory standards in the US and Europe. To make data regions easier to manage, Google automates the migration of data when users move between regions without any impact on file availability or edit rights during the process.
New AI-enabled features:

- Smart reply in Hangout Chats: Already available in Gmail, Smart Reply has now been extended to Google Hangout Chats. It works like this: Google Cloud recognizes which messages most likely need a response and provides three different replies that sound like how the user typically responds. This makes sending short responses super easy and fast, especially for workers on the go.
- Smart Compose in Gmail: For emails that require more complex responses, Google autocompletes emails based on the users previous interactions and context. The feature can fill in greetings, sign-offs and common phrases, and also insert personalized information like the users office or home address to eliminate repetitive tasks. Smart Compose also learns how users typically greet specific people so that the messages sound more natural.
- Grammar suggestions in Google Docs: This feature leverage Google Translation to identify and automatically suggest corrections. The AI catches simple grammatical rules like when to use “a” instead of “an”, to more complex concepts like how to use subordinate clauses correctly. Moreover, through machine learning, the capability only improves over time to handle more complex grammar issues.
- Natural language search: If a user is looking for a specific piece of data or any information in Google Docs or Sheets, they can simply type in a question in the search box, and it will be located. For example, if the user is looking for top quarterly revenues in a certain time period, they can type “What quarter had the highest revenues”.

While the company made a whopping 105 announcements at Google Cloud Next, these are just a few that directly impact the end user computing space we are part of. Overall, the event was fantastic, and the itopia team is looking forward to Google Cloud Next’19 in April!

To get started with itopia CAS, sign up here to redeem a $300 credit on Google Cloud

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Tuesday 31 July 2018

itopia Announces Support for Hybrid Active Directory-Based Deployments on Google Cloud Platform

IT and cloud software automation provider itopia today introduced new hybrid cloud capabilities with the extension of on-premises Active Directory environments into Google Cloud Platform (GCP)-hosted AD. The company also announced new server-only deployment automation features.

MIAMI (PRWEB) JULY 23, 2018

IT and cloud software automation provider itopia today introduced new hybrid cloud capabilities with the extension of on-premises Active Directory (AD) environments into Google Cloud Platform (GCP)-hosted AD. The company also announced new server-only deployment automation features.

itopia, a leader in virtual desktop automation for Google Cloud, has released new features in Cloud Automation Stack (CAS) designed to facilitate hybrid cloud deployments. The new CAS capabilities enable IT departments to easily extend RDS-based and non-RDS virtual desktop deployments that are dependent on on-premises AD domains into GCP, and across the globe. itopia CAS is now also capable of automating and orchestrating the management of enterprise-scale, server-only environments on GCP through a single-pane-of-glass portal.

The new “Cloud AD” feature enables businesses to deploy and manage enterprise-grade desktop and infrastructure environments on GCP in multiple geographic regions. This will ensure that, regardless of conditions or events, domains remain highly available and accessible in GCP’s highly redundant data centers. Through a single-click deployment, IT administrators can now:

Launch automated Windows instances in different GCP sites, regions and zones;
Create a VPN from the primary and secondary sites to GCP; and
Join cloud instances to an existing on-premises AD domain and deploy highly available GCP-based domain controllers.

Additionally, itopia’s end-to-end automation, orchestration and management platform has been extended to server-only environments. Enterprise IT administrators can now leverage the existing capabilities in CAS to deploy and manage hundreds – even thousands – of servers in hybrid on-premises and GCP-based infrastructure deployments, including:

Server Uptime Scheduling: This allows IT administrators to automate the time when servers spin up or down according to business demand, eliminating the costs of unused and idle infrastructure and VMs while potentially saving up to 50 percent on cloud costs.
Snapshot Automation: itopia CAS leverages Google Cloud Automatic Snapshot technology to automate Windows server backups and data recovery. Scheduling automated snapshots not only saves time and expense in the event of downtime, but ensures that data is always quickly retrievable from Google Cloud’s redundant data centers.
Auto-Scaling: Automatically increase or decrease server count or server resources based upon workload demand and user count. As users are added or removed, itopia CAS automatically adjusts infrastructure resources to match user and workload demand.

“These new features facilitate global, hybrid enterprise deployments with CAS’s single-click automation for the full-IT stack, eliminating the need for any manual configuration on GCP. We built these features based on invaluable, real-world feedback from our joint customers with Google Cloud,” said itopia CTO and Co-Founder Ubaldo Don.

“itopia CAS is really shaping up to be the ‘automation of all things IT’ on GCP,” adds itopia CEO and Co-Founder Jonathan Lieberman. “While they’re an excellent example, cloud desktops represent only one use case for CAS. These new capabilities are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s in the pipeline.”

About itopia

itopia’s Cloud Automation Stack (CAS) technology is the industry’s leading enterprise IT automation and orchestration solution purpose-built for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments. CAS gives enterprise IT departments and service providers the ability to automate all things IT on GCP, including: virtual desktops and applications, graphic workstations, hybrid Active Directory (AD) environments, AD-based disaster recovery and Windows and Linux virtual machines—all through a single pane of glass management portal. For more information on itopia’s solutions please visit: http://www.itopia.com.

Press contact: Karin Kelley, kkelley(at)itopia(dot)com

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