Google Inc. today unveiled an almost numbing array of new cloud security, data analytics and collaboration services in a continuing drive to convince big companies that they need to make the tech giant’s cloud computing services a core part of their operations.

Among the new services were a raft of security hardware and software aimed at large enterprises, ways to move and analyze massive amounts of data, and business team-focused updates to Google’s G Suite of productivity applications such as Hangouts video and chat services. Google made the announcements on the second day of its annual Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, which is aimed at software developers and business partners.

The company known best for its dominant search service trails far behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the business of providing computing, storage and other tech services online. It’s hoping to capture a larger share of cloud computing as large enterprises shift computing workloads from their own data centers to the cloud. Today it blitzed prospective customers with services and improvements that check off a series of requirements for enterprises.

Urs Hölzle (pictured), senior vice president of Google’s technical infrastructure, told the audience that the company has spent nearly $30 billion building its infrastructure and runs its own massive businesses on it — the implication being that any other business can do the same. Google glosses over the fact that it has been difficult for many companies to adapt its cloud services to their situations — chiefly that many can’t move applications wholesale to the cloud for a variety of technical and regulatory reasons. But it clearly hopes the message will resonate as more companies feel compelled by cloud economics to shift from running their own data centers.

“We’ve been living this cloud at scale,” Hölzle said. “We designed every part of our infrastructure so you can be uniquely productive.”

The announcements today covered three main areas: security, data analytics and productivity applications.

Productivity

Google has steadily been beefing up its G suite of applications such as Drive and Hangouts to appeal to larger and more diverse companies. One of the most prominent announcements today was Google’s decision to split its Hangouts chat and videoconferencing app into separate “experiences”: Meet and Chat.

Meet, which is now generally available, is intended to make video meetings much easier. It takes only single clicks to start or join a meeting or share a document. And for paying corporate customers, the meetings include dedicated dial-in phone numbers to avoid connectivity problems from remote team members.

The Chat experience (below), which will have an early-access program, is intended to make Hangouts more useful for teams. It provides dedicated, virtual “rooms” with threaded conversations. In other words, it’s Google’s take on the enormously popular Slack, but with integration with Drive and Google Docs.

Another significant unveiling was Team Drives, which makes it easier for enterprises to add new team members, managing sharing permissions and tracks files no matter who joins or leaves the team. And new administrative controls for Vault for Drive allows for more control of issues of corporate governance and regulatory compliance, such as how long data should be retained. Taken together, the features are a signal that Google is now focusing its G Suite efforts more on business than consumer needs, said Jonathan Rochelle, a G Suite product management director.

Security

Security has been seen as a potential weakness for cloud computing, based simply on the fact that data no longer resides in a clearly identifiable place inside corporate walls. “The perception among customers was that security was felt to be not as important in the cloud,” Jennifer Lin, an engineering director for Google Cloud security, told SiliconANGLE.

To help change that perception, Google unveiled a number of new hardware and software products. One was a new chip called Titan (shown here in a module) that will be installed in Google servers to identify and authenticate user access to businesses’ networks, providing a deeper hardware level of security.

On the software side, Google launched a way for enterprises to control their encryption keys in the cloud. It also announced beta test versions of an “identity-aware proxy,” which allows access applications based on their specific identities rather than relying virtual private network, and Data Loss Prevention programming interface that uses machine learning to allow companies to find sensitive data and mask it — for example, a credit card number mentioned in a customer service chat.

“Google has probably the most data to make a network proxy intelligent,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research. “And it is the right level to catch this, but it needs machine intelligence and lots of data scale — which Google has.”

Overall, the products and services are intended to make security management easier in the cloud. “You shouldn’t have to do much to do security in the cloud,” said Maya Kaczorowski, a Google product manager. “It should be ‘noOps.’” In an echo of what Amazon Web Services executives have been saying, Lin said many customers are now feeling that the Google Cloud Platform is actually more secure than their own data centers.

Data analytics

One of the biggest obstacles for big businesses is getting all the data they need for various analytics tasks in one place and preparing it to be readable in a form that their analytics applications can use. So Google announced a series of new features to make that easier.

For one, Google’s venerable data warehouse, called BigQuery, now has new ways for customers to add their data from various Google advertising services such as AdWords and YouTube, as well as commercial data sets such as Dow Jones and Accuweather so they can get more accurate views of customers and do better data analysis for improved marketing and ad targeting.

It also added a new data preparation tool (screenshot below) that can automatically divine various types of data and prepare them to be readable for machine learning or other data analysis tools. That’s important because 75 percent or more of the time it takes to do analytics is spent on data preparation. “Data prep is a key step,” said Mueller– not just for customers but to counter AWS as well.

“All this is a critical part of making companies able to move to the cloud,” Fausto Ibarra, a director of product management, told SiliconANGLE.

The flurry of new products and features is appealing to some customers. Anirban Kundu, chief technology officer of Evernote, the note-taking app that went entirely to the Google Cloud for its operations, said the speed of feature development was one reason the company went with Google. And Stu Miniman, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, said Google has appeared to learn how to speak to enterprises and provide the features they want.

But is it enough? That’s not certain yet. Miniman said the blocking and tackling nature of the features means there weren’t single blockbuster releases. “There’s always a wow factor at AWS Re:invent,” Amazon Web Services’ much bigger annual conference. “There’s no wow I’ve seen here.”

Featured photo: Robert Hof; other images: Google