It’s not only line-of-business users who are taking more and more of their work outside the office. As organizations grow ever-dependent on external resources, so do cloud administrators find that their skills are also increasingly needed when they’re away from their stations, a demand Google Inc. hopes to tackle with the latest update to the companion app for its infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The new release expands upon the existing alerting functionality with capabilities for responding to important notifications. A user can now log into their Google Cloud Platform deployment via a secure connection and quickly roll out an urgent patch to one of their applications or rein in a process that’s taking up too much computational power from the comfort of their mobile devices.

That kills two birds with one stone, sparing administrators the hassle of scurrying back to the office every time an issue rears its head during non-office hours while significantly cutting the amount of time that end-users have to spend waiting for their services to come back online. For Google’s largest customers, every hour of averted downtime can translate into millions of dollars in salvaged revenues.

Rounding out the update is an enhanced monitoring console that extends visibility to operational data stored in the storage component of its public cloud, including billing history, operational logs and any other important information kept there. That cuts another one of the chains that has traditionally shackled administrators to their desks.

Given their central role in their organizations’ cloud strategies, Google’s effort to make its platform as friendly as possible to operations professionals shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise. It’s one of the several ways in which the search giant is trying to gain ground against rivals Amazon Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which are both significantly ahead in the infrastructure-as-a-service space.

The Google Cloud Console app is available immediately on both iOS and Android.

Photo via giografiche