Cloud providers are rapidly deploying new infrastructure to address the growing demand for their services. Last week, Amazon Inc. launched three data centers in Ohio as part of the effort that will allow organizations from the Great Lakes region to host workloads closer to their offices.

The provider now boasts 38 cloud facilities in 14 geographic regions, which puts it well ahead of competitors such as Google. But the search giant is slowly closing the gap. Earlier this year, it announced plans to open 10 additional data centers of its own by the end of 2017. And the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary took another step forward last week by introducing a set of new storage services geared towards organizations with diverse cloud workloads.

The biggest addition is Coldline, a managed archiving system that allows users to keep their most infrequently-accessed records on Google’s infrastructure for less than a cent per gigabyte per month. It’s designed to complement its existing Coldline service, which is geared towards slightly more important files that are used every few months or so. Complementary data lifecycle management functionality that is rolling out in conjunction with the update allows organizations to move information back and forth between the services as their operational requirements change.

While Google and the other major cloud providers step up their competitive efforts, the software-as-a-service is heating up as well. Last week saw Zenefits Inc. announce a major overhaul of its popular human relations management platform in a move designed to help customers take better advantage of their payroll data. The main highlight is the introduction of 17 third party integrations that makes it possible to incorporate employee records into various automation workflows. A company that relies on Google’s G Suite, for instance, can now have corporate email accounts automatically opened for new hires after they’ve been added to the Zenefits database.

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