Last week saw the spirit of collaboration envelope the cloud ecosystem as several of the biggest names in the business partnered up to help their users become more productive. Box Inc. and Okta Inc. led the charge by expanding the integration between their respective platforms to help ease the task of protecting corporate data from theft.

Administrators can now have the latter’s security service require certain conditions to be met before a mobile worker is allowed to access their organization’s file sharing environment. Okta may be set to ask for additional login credentials, limit usage of the Box client to pre-approved devices or even impose several such controls at the same time when particularly sensitive data is at stake. The functionality is managed through a centralized console that removes the need to manually modify the restrictions on every employee’s end-point when operational requirements change.

Following in Box’s footsteps, Salesforce.com Inc. has also turned to its partner ecosystem for help with reducing the adminsitrative burden on its customers. The company last week unveiled a field service management solution that incorporates functionality from ClickSoftware Inc. to help the specialists who work with an organization’s customers out in the trenches. When a new assignment comes down the pipe, the cloud-based system is able to find the closest technician to the client with the right skills for the job and send the necessary instructions to their mobile device.

Salesforce Field Service Lighting thereby makes the task assignment process much more efficient while freeing up dispatchers to focus on other work in the same stroke. That’s similar to what Google Inc.’s hopes to achieve with the new version of Kubernetes that rolled out against the backdrop of the service’s launch. The container orchestration framework can now automatically update an application when a new version is available and undo the rollout if any technical issues are detected afterwards, all with minimal input from administrators. 

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