Google Cloud announced a new virtual machine (VM) management console this week in a bid to ease enterprise cloud transitions. The platform, dubbed VM Manager, is aimed at customers that maintain large fleets of Google Compute Engine instances.

As enterprises shift more of their workloads to the cloud, many are faced with unfamiliar configuration and management tools, especially when it comes to infrastructure security and compliance visibility, according to Ravi Kiran Chintalapudi, product manager at Google Cloud Platform. “Customers tell us they need simplified cloud-native tools to operate and manage their cloud resources, similar to their familiar on-premise infrastructure management tools,” Kiran wrote in a blog post.

VM Manager attempts to address these challenges by putting all of the infrastructure tools commonly used to manage large VM deployments in one place. The cloud provider claims the new console enables customers to configure, monitor, and patch large numbers of workloads running in Google Compute Engine simultaneously.

The platform is compatible with Compute Engine instances running most popular Windows and Linux distributions.

Features include patch management tools for monitoring and deploying security and OS updates across a large number of VMs; configuration management for ensuring VMs are configured and deployed in accordance with corporate security policy; and inventory management for collecting OS and package information across a deployment.

VM Manager is available starting today, and Google plans to add additional features to the platform over the next few months.

The announcement comes less than a week after Google rolled out its second BeyondCorp zero-trust security product with new enterprise capabilities

Google introduced its first BeyondCorp product back in April 2020. It was the first commercial release of the zero-trust philosophy that Google implemented internally more than a decade ago.

This week’s updates introduced embedded data and threat protection aimed at preventing malicious or unintentional data loss and exfiltration and malware infections from the network to the browser.

Google also boosted its BeyondCorp Alliance, which allows customers to integrate zero-trust protection with their existing network and endpoint security tools from vendors including Check Point, Citrix, CrowdStrike, Jamf, Lookout, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, Tanium, and VMware.