Google has completely revamped G Suite in a bid to infuse its productivity tools with AI to reduce clutter and boost security.

Revealing the new-look G Suite today, Google doubled down on efforts to help users manage email overload – if not to achieve inbox zero – and stay on top of their to-do lists with a new Tasks feature that syncs across Gmail and Google Calendar.

“Today we’re announcing major updates to help the more than 4 million paying businesses that use G Suite work safer, smarter and more efficiently,” said David Thacker, product management VP of G Suite.

“This includes an all-new Gmail, with a brand new look on the web, advanced security features, new applications of Google’s artificial intelligence and even more integrations with other G Suite apps.”

Gmail: Using AI to declutter your inbox

Google started adding AI to Gmail last year with the ability to use ‘smart replies’ to quickly respond to emails with phrases Google’s machine learning algorithms would come up with.

Today the company expanded on that capability by extending that from its mobile app to Gmail on the web browser, as well as bringing its smart capabilities to bear on problems like the daily email deluge.

Firstly, a snooze button lets you postpone emails that users don’t have time to reply to immediately, allowing users to set a time to send that email back to the top of their unreads.

A host of buttons in the top-right corner also easily allows users to access Calendar and other useful apps.

Anything that’s unread but not been responded to, Gmail will ‘nudge’ users about, highlighting the age of the message next to it in yellow text and asking whether users would like to reply.

High-priority notifications are coming to Gmail on mobile too, with Gmail’s smart capabilities selecting messages it deems important and re-flagging them for users’ attention. It’ll also suggest when to unsubscribe from newsletters or promotions that are regularly left unopened.

Gmail: Confidential mode

With phishing attacks, ransomware and impersonation attacks all serious threats organisations face, Google has also taken the opportunity to improve security.

“We’ve revisited some of the fundamentals of email security to make everyone’s data safe,” explained Jacob Bank, product manager of Gmail.

The new Gmail will try to improve user security by flagging potentially dangerous emails that make it through its spam filter with a big red message.

But the key feature is confidential mode, which allows people to remove the ability to forward, copy, download or print certain messages, such as messages containing personal information.

It also lets users set expiration dates for messages so that data is automatically deleted.

Gmail: Offline capability

For executives trying to use their downtime to stay on top of their emails, a new offline mode will be a huge help. It allows users to search their email, compose emails, respond to messages and archive up to 90 days of messages offline, syncing the changes when they’re connected to the internet again.

Tasks

Google has also introduced Tasks on the web browser, a new tool that lets users create tasks (and sub-tasks within those), adding due dates for those tasks and notifications to remind you when the deadline is approaching.

Just dragging an email from Gmail into Tasks creates a new to-do item, and once a due date’s added it’ll appear in Calendar.

Oracle has built out its UK cloud offering with the addition of several new services to its local region.

Those include Oracle’s autonomous database, Exadata, AI and blockchain, which are all now available from its UK data centres, meaning organisations that store their data locally can now leverage these capabilities.

They can also take advantage of Oracle’s bare metal cloud based on its new X7 server, and block storage, both designed for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Claiming the UK-hosted services benefit from “extremely low latency and high bandwidth”, James Stanbridge, VP and lead product manager for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in Europe and Asia, said: “It’s a very significant new region and what Oracle is doing and our strategy has been over many years now is to build new regions and cloud capabilities exactly where and when customers need them to meet their growing needs to complete their transformation to the cloud.”

Oracle touted customers like Bristol startup YellowDog, which specialises in processing HPC workloads, and the National Grid, to show its cloud is attracting users both big and small.

“The goal National Grid has is a complete IT transformation from on-premise to a cloud-first strategy – that’s by no means unusual [among our customers],” Stanbridge told Cloud Pro.

“These IT transformation projects have long lead times on them, much more like six to nine-month projects. I’m seeing that in data centre regions in the EU. We are starting to see some of those large IT transformations move in [to the UK region].”

Oracle’s new additions to its UK region come as part of a new push to expand its global data centre footprint, opening 12 new regions of three or more facilities across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

It added new UK facilities in the first half of 2017, alongside an expansion in Turkey and the US. Oracle spent just $1.7 billion on new cloud regions in 2016, compared to $31 billion by rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google. CEO Mark Hurd defended his company’s outlay by saying that Oracle’s fast hardware meant it could provide fewer facilities.

Just 16% of enterprises use just one cloud, with two-thirds having a strategy in place for a hybrid approach, according to a new report.

Companies in the early stages of cloud adoption are likely to be using one cloud as they assess operational challenges of migrating, or if they’re only pushing a few workloads into the cloud as they keep sensitive data on-premise, an investigation by 451 Research has revealed.

But the vast majority of firms – 84% – are using multiple clouds for improved speed and agility, the analyst house’s survey of 1,500 CIOs and IT managers at large enterprises, conducted in association with NTT Com and Dell EMC, found.

“Over 80% of the respondents to this study currently use multiple cloud environments, with varying amounts of integration, migration and interaction between them,” said Liam Eagle, 451’s research manager for cloud, hosting and managed services.

“Perhaps most significant is that approximately a quarter of companies already use some form of hybrid cloud – using the definition of seamless delivery of a single business function across multiple environments.”

For those firms looking at hybrid cloud, security is the biggest factor, but 451 warned that traditional measures like firewalls and access controls will need to be re-tooled for hybrid environments, which require integrated tools designed for the cloud.

However, security is also the biggest barrier to adopting hybrid cloud, giving IT security teams a headache in having to track and monitor different workloads in different states, and protect them in transit and at rest. With multiple environments – both on-premise and cloud – access control is also more difficult, 451 said.

Innovation is a lesser driver pushing companies down a hybrid route, and the report said that hybrid cloud only indirectly leads to this “as part of a wider business strategy”.

“Innovation is not inherently linked to operational efficiency per se, unless it involves for example energy savings, the realization of new products or services or significant transformation,” the report read.

Another minor reason to move to hybrid was to avoid vendor lock-in with a single cloud, with large enterprises used to dealing with a wide variety of suppliers looking to replicate this approach in the cloud.

Other barriers include operational complexity in managing different environments, where cloud is a seamless extension of on-premise, and a difficulty in migrating workloads like applications and databases in the cloud.

Where these “cannot be migrated, there is inherent cost in re-development and delay in implementation”, 451 warned.

Public sector suppliers have welcomed a government turnaround that will now see G-Cloud 10 go live in June 2018.

Vendors will be able to apply to list their services on the public sector cloud procurement framework from April, much sooner than expected after Whitehall had initially mooted extending the previous iteration of G-Cloud into 2019.

Crown Commercial Services’ (CCS’s) decision to effectively reverse its earlier position means a new glut of small cloud suppliers can bid for government work, while companies already listed on G-Cloud can update the services they offer.

Oliver Dowden, minister for implementation, said: “I’m pleased to confirm that we will re-let the G-Cloud framework, which provides opportunities to many small businesses in the digital sector.

“This will provide innovative online solutions to government, supporting the delivery of efficient, effective public services. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, so it’s crucial that we listen to them when shaping policy, as we have done today.”

Suppliers can typically expect details of a new version of G-Cloud to circulate around six months before it’s due to launch, but by November last year they had yet to receive any information from CCS, which subsequently extended G-Cloud 9 until May 2019.

But rumours of a turnaround have been rumbling for some time, and CCS cancelled a webinar back in January, saying it was “overwhelmed by the feedback we have received for G10”.

Suppliers can finally update their offerings

News this week that G-Cloud 10 is once again on the horizon was therefore welcomed by suppliers that rely on the framework for large portions of their businesses.

Nicky Stewart, commercial director of IaaS, PaaS and email provider UKCloud, told Cloud Pro: “I’m absolutely delighted that they have brought it forward for all sorts of reasons. First but not foremost it shows CCS is capable of listening because there was a bit of an outcry when they did delay G10.

“For UKCloud, we have a host of exciting new products and services and it’s great now we have a near-term vehicle to reach public sector buyers with those, but above all it shows that government is committed to G-Cloud, that it’s committed to the SMB community and the rapid benefits G-Cloud is bringing government.”

Harry Metcalfe, MD of digital design supplier dxw, added: “We have lots of new services we were working on for G-Cloud so we were irritated it was delayed, so this is really great news.

“Frankly I think that speaks quite highly of CCS [that they brought G10 forward]. CCS puts itself out there as an organisation that listens to its suppliers and here they have demonstrated that’s really truly the case.”

The current G-Cloud 9 framework has 2,856 suppliers, over 90% of which are SMBs, and the arrival of version 10 means even more suppliers will be able to join it.

Industry trade body TechUK’s head of public sector, Rob Driver, said: “The announcement of the G-Cloud 10 framework should be welcomed as it allows new innovative providers to work with government, enables new services to be provided and is an opportunity to engage with the wider public sector to make use of the framework.”

But challenges for suppliers remain with the Digital Marketplace

Since its creation in 2012, G-Cloud has seen public sector buyers spend more than £2.8 billion with private sector companies, with nearly half of that going to small and medium businesses.

But this spending data is old, dating from the end of 2017, and this is just one of the issues suppliers still have with G-Cloud, and the Digital Marketplace within which the framework sits.

“With G-Cloud there’s no visibility of the tenders and opportunities,” said UKCloud’s Stewart. “For a very transparent framework one of the areas that could be improved is you have no idea as a supplier if you’re on any buyers’ lists or in the running for an opportunity.”

Only shortlisted suppliers get that insight, making it harder to understand what opportunities are in the pipeline, what competitors you’re up against or what buyers are searching for, she said.

“The only way to extrapolate that kind of data is to get the G-Cloud spend data, but … we have only got data up to the end of 2017. That means it’s quite difficult to understand the market.”

Another issue Stewart highlighted was the fact that suppliers cannot alter prices on a framework, and are being forced to wait until the next iteration comes along to make revisions. This is an issue for vendors that face increased third-party costs, she said.

“There has to be some consideration of how do you deal with third-party price rises that are out of suppliers’ control,” she argued. “SMBs are not as well placed to absorb those increases as bigger suppliers.”

Unspecified delays to the next versions of both the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) framework to draft in digital specialists, and the Cyber Security Services framework, have become a bugbear for dxw’s Metcalfe, but he said he’s hopeful they won’t be delayed for much longer.