Technology

You thought Google+ was dead, didn&t you And it is — if you&re a consumer. But the business version of Googlesocial network will live on for the foreseeable future — and itgetting a bunch of new features today.

Google+ for G Suiteisn&t all that different from the Google+ for consumers, but its focus is very much on allowing users inside a company to easily share information. Current users include the likes of Nielsen and French retailer Auchan.

The new features that Google is announcing today give admins more tools for managing and reviewing posts, allow employees to tag content and provide better engagement metrics to posters.

Recently Google introduced the ability for admins to bulk-add groups of users to a Google+ community, for example. And soon, those admins will be able to better review and moderate posts made by their employees. Soon, admins will also be able to define custom streams so that employees could get access to a stream with all of the posts from a companyleadership team, for example.

But whatmaybe more important in this context is that tags now make it easy for employees to route content to everybody in the company, no matter which group they work in. &Even if you don&t know all employees across an organization, tags makes it easier to route content to the right folks,& the company explains in todayblog post. &Soon you&ll be able to draft posts and see suggested tags, like #research or #customer-insights when posting customer survey results.&

As far as the new metrics go, therenothing all that exciting going on here, but G Suite customers who keep their reporting structure in the service will be able to provide analytics to employees so they can see how their posts are being viewed across the company and which teams engage most with them.

At the end of the day, none of these are revolutionary features. But the timing of todayannouncement surely isn&t a coincidence, given that Google announced the death of the consumer version of Google+ — and the data breach that went along with that — only a few days ago. Todayannouncement is clearly meant to be a reminder that Google+ for the enterprise isn&t going away and remains in active development. I don&t think all that many businesses currently use Google+, though, and with Hangouts Chat and other tools, they now have plenty of options for sharing content across groups.

Itbeen about two years since Google acquired API management service Apigee. Today, the company is announcing new extensions that make it easier to integrate the service with a number of Google Cloud services, as well as the general availability of the companyAPI monitoring solution.

Apigee API monitoring allows operations teams to get more insight into how their APIs are performing.The idea here is to make it easy for these teamsto figure out when therean issue and whatthe root cause for it by giving them very granular data. &APIs are now part of how a lot of companies are doing business,& Ed Anuff, Apigeeformer SVP of productstrategy and now Googleproduct and strategy lead for the service, told me. &So that tees up the need for API monitoring.&

Anuff also told me that hebelievesthat itstill early days for enterprise API adoption — but that also means that Apigee is currently growing fast as enterprise developers now start adopting modern development techniques. &I think we&re actually still pretty early in enterprise adoption of APIs,& he said. &So what we&re seeing is a lot more customers going into full production usage of their APIs. A lot of what we had seen before was people using it for maybe an experiment or something that they were doing with a couple of partners.& He also attributed part of the recent growth to customers launching more mobile applications where APIs obviously form the backbone of much of the logic that drives those apps.

API Monitoring was already available as a beta, but itnow generally available to all Apigee customers.

Given that itnow owned by Google, itno surprise that Apigee is also launching deeper integrations with Googlecloud services now — specifically services like BigQuery, Cloud Firestore, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and Spanner. Some Apigee customers are already using this to store every message passed through their APIs to create extensive logs, often for compliance reasons. Others use Cloud Firestore to personalize content delivery for their web users or to collect data from their APIs and then send that to BigQuery for analysis.

Anuff stressed that Apigee remains just as open to third-party integrations as it always was. That is part of the core promise of APIs, after all.

Google is playing catch-up in the cloud, and as such it wants to provide flexibility to differentiate itself from AWS and Microsoft. Today, the company announced a couple of new options to help separate it from the cloud storage pack.

Storage may seem stodgy, but ita primary building block for many cloud applications. Before you can build an application you need the data that will drive it, and thatwhere the storage component comes into play.

One of the issues companies have as they move data to the cloud is making sure it stays close to the application when itneeded to reduce latency. Customers also require redundancy in the event of a catastrophic failure, but still need access with low latency. The latter has been a hard problem to solve until today when Google introduced a new dual-regional storage option.

As Google described it in the blog post announcing the new feature, &With this new option, you write to a single dual-regional bucket without having to manually copy data between primary and secondary locations. No replication tool is needed to do this and there are no network charges associated with replicating the data, which means less overhead for you storage administrators out there. In the event of a region failure, we transparently handle the failover and ensure continuity for your users and applications accessing data in Cloud Storage.&

This allows companies to have redundancy with low latency, while controlling where it goes without having to manually move it should the need arise.

Knowing what you&re paying

Companies don&t always require instant access to data, and Google (and other cloud vendors) offer a variety of storage options, making it cheaper to store and retrieve archived data. As of today, Google is offering a clear way to determine costs, based on customer storage choice types. While it might not seem revolutionary to let customers know what they are paying, Dominic Preuss, Googledirector of product management says it hasn&t always been a simple matter to calculate these kinds of costs in the cloud. Google decided to simplify it by clearly outlining the costs for medium (Nearline) and long-term (Coldline) storage across multiple regions.

As Google describes it, &With multi-regional Nearline and Coldline storage, you can access your data with millisecond latency, itdistributed redundantly across a multi-region (U.S., EU or Asia), and you pay archival prices. This is helpful when you have data that won&t be accessed very often, but still needs to be protected with geographically dispersed copies, like media archives or regulated content. It also simplifies management.&

Under the new plan, you can select the type of storage you need, the kind of regional coverage you want and you can see exactly what you are paying.

Google Cloud storage pricing options. Chart: Google

Each of these new storage services has been designed to provide additional options for Google Cloud customers, giving them more transparency around pricing and flexibility and control over storage types, regions and the way they deal with redundancy across data stores.