Jaikumar Vijayan

Google has unified its mobile and web payment services under a single brand as part of a broader effort to enable a more consistent payment experience across its products.  Effective this week, Google’s new Google Pay app for Android has replaced the company’s previously separate Android Pay and Google Wallet apps. Users can use credit […]

Google has announced plans to acquire LogMeIn’s Xively business unit for $50 million in a move that should help bolster Google’s capabilities in the IoT device management space.  Xively’s IoT management, messaging and dashboard technologies will become part of Google’s Cloud IoT Core, a managed service for connecting and managing distributed internet-connected devices.  Antony Passemard, […]

Google this week announced general availability of new high-performance virtual machine configuration options for enterprises running large workloads on its cloud platform.  The new VM configurations support up to 96 virtual CPUs and up to 624 gigabytes of memory. The VM types are optimized to take advantage of the substantial performance gains offered by Google’s […]

Google has released a new family of internally designed hardware accelerators for speeding up certain machine learning workloads on the company’s cloud platform.  Google’s new Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are available for beta evaluation purposes starting this week. Each TPU comprises of four application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). A single TPU packs up to […]

The clock is winding down for website owners to adopt HTTPS encryption. Starting July, Google’s Chrome browser will start labeling any site and any web page still using HTTP as “not secure”. The move is part of a long-standing effort by Google to get websites everywhere to use encryption to better protect Internet communications and […]

Google last year paid $2.9 million in total to bug hunters who found security vulnerabilities in its products and services. The amount is slightly less than the over $3 million the company paid out in bug bounties in 2016. It brings to over $12 million that Google has paid in total for vulnerability discoveries since […]

Organizations using Google Drive to store and share files in the cloud now have an easier way to interact with Microsoft Office files, PDFs and image files. Google has introduced a new feature in Drive that lets users make comments directly on Microsoft Office files, and other files without requiring Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat Reader […]

As it has done many times over the past year with unwanted Android applications on its Play store, Google has removed 89 browser extensions from its official Chrome web store after a security vendor identified them as being malicious.  Google has also disabled the rogue extensions from running on the devices of over 420,000 Chrome […]

Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) group has rolled out a new feature that the company says gives organizations a better way to enforce the principle of least privilege on users accessing enterprise data and services in the cloud.  Google has been beta testing the new custom roles feature for Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) […]

bad apps from its Play mobile app store last year.  The number represented a 70 percent increase over the number of apps that Google removed from the store in 2016.  Not only did Google remove more apps that violated Google Play policies, it also was able to identify them and boot them out sooner, Google […]

Google’s Orbitera ecommerce unit has teamed up with MobileIron in a partnership designed to give enterprises a more secure way to buy and deploy Software-as-a-Service apps in the cloud.  Under the effort the two companies are collaborating on a new cloud service that will combine Orbitera’s commerce platform with MobileIron’s cloud security and mobile app […]

Researchers at Trend Micro this week uncovered a malware campaign that used Google’s DoubleClick ad network to distribute crypto-currency miners on systems belonging to Internet users in France, Spain, Italy, Japan and other countries.  Trend Micro noticed the campaign on Jan. 24 and informed Google about the problem. Traffic related to the campaign has fallen […]