Last month today: March in Google Cloud

While many of us had plans for March—including simply carrying out our normal routines—life as we know it has been upended by the global coronavirus pandemic. In a time of social distancing, technology has played a greater role in bringing us together. Here’s a look at stories from March that explored how cloud technology is helping and how it works under the hood to keep us connected.

Technology in a time of uncertainty

• There are a lot of moving pieces, and a lot of dedicated technical people, who keep Google Cloud running every day, even when traffic spikes or unexpected events happen. Take a look at some of what’s involved with keeping systems running smoothly at Google, including SRE principles, longstanding disaster recovery testing, proprietary hardware, and built-in reserve capacity to ensure infrastructure performance. Plus, support agents are now provisioned for remote access, and an enhanced support structure is available for high-traffic industries during this time. 

• You can dig deeper in this post on Google’s network infrastructure to learn how it is performing even under pressure. Google’s dedicated network is a global system of high-capacity fiber optic cables under both land and sea, and connects to last-mile providers to deliver data locally.

• Data plays a huge role in public health, and access to data sets and tools are essential for researchers, data scientists, and analysts responding to COVID-19. There’s now a hosted repository of related public datasets available to explore and analyze for free in BigQuery. These include the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, Global Health Data from the World Bank, and more.

Working at home, together 

• As work-from-home situations became a necessity globally in March, video conferencing and live streaming became even more essential for daily communication at work, school, and home. With that in mind, we announced free access to our advanced Meet capabilities to G Suite and G Suite for Education customers, including room for up to 250 participants per call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive. Plus, we added Meet improvements for remote learning, and use of Google Meet surged to 25 times what it was in January, with day-over-day growth surpassing 60%. 

• Technology is an essential aspect of working from home, but so is finding ways to collaborate with teammates and stay focused and productive amid distractions. Check out these eight tips for working from home for ways you can be proactive, organized, and engaged with work.

Supporting those at-home workers

• In this time of added network load and many people getting acquainted with working from home for the first time, the G Suite Meet team shared some best practices for IT admins to support their teams. These include tips on managing device policies, communicating effectively at scale, and use analytics to improve or change employee experiences. Plus, find some best practices that developers using G Suite APIs can follow to stay ahead of new user demands and onboarding. 

That’s a wrap for March.